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You can read her manifesto about this at http://www.holemusic.com/speech/
It's more in depth than this article and comes from someone who has been there, a good read..

I'm inclined to say "Great Idea!" but before I do so I'd like to know how much of this $15 would end up in the artists pockets?

If it's anything like Courtney Love's RIAA / Recording Artist math, I think it will just put more cash in the wrong pockets.

Seems like the Artists should get a higher percentage than their standard recording contract might allow, since this would be a major impulse buy on the part of many concert goers - especially considering the effect of various substances and inhibitions.

I hope more artists sign up for this.

Hell, I don't want my favorite artists distracting themselves with this business bullshit, unless being a fighter is part of what they already are, like Ani diFranco or Courtney Love. Life is too short, time too scarce for the few genuinely talented artists we have to go running off on tangents.

This is a battle that we, the consumers, should be fighting. If we decide, en masse, not to play the RIAA's game, what the Hell can they do.

Can I suggest that PeerCast (as discussed on /. earlier) is a very good place to start.

And, remember, if we really want to stop these bastards shagging us, we must always remember that our participation in P2P has to be about growing a new, fairer system, not just getting our hands on free stuff.

• There's an article entitled "Courtney Love does the math" that talks about why Napster isn't the problem

The big eye opener for me is this line: "It's not piracy when kids swap music over the Internet using Napster or Gnutella or Freenet or iMesh or beaming their CDs into a My.MP3.com or MyPlay.com music locker. It's piracy when those guys that run those companies make side deals with the cartel lawyers and label heads so that they can be "the labels' friend," and not the artists'."

Napster, uh, yeah, I remember them. The guys who tried to move up to the Big League with the labels, right? Didn't they used to run a P2P service? ;-)

That's not to say she's completely getting it though. She's a bit confused about the ability of (e.g.) Gnutella to control the content that's being shared; girlie, there's no point exhorting a bunch of P2P developers to work with you. My god, Limewire (the most professional gnutella client development team that I know of) has six code monkeys and a web guy working on it. How can they negotiate deals with tens of thousands of artists? And that's just one solitary client running the gnutella protocol.

And the horrible thing is, Courtney is still stuck in litigation with Universal. See Hole's web site for the latest news. And notice that despite good intentions, Courtney is still not offering us what we want. You can download 60-some 128 bit MP3's right off the site (all live recordings rather than studio recordings, because lest we forget, the studio owns all rights to the music, and Courtney only owns limited rights to her performances of it), and you can click on a link to buy albums from CDNOW or Amazon. But you can't pay money for the MP3's, or pay for better quality ones. It's frustrating when even the champions of the e-distribution campaign don't give us the chance to show how lucrative sales of uncrippled, high quality, correctly labelled, untruncated, non-radio edit mp3's could be - if they were only given a chance.

The problem here is that even if you had, say, only MP3's of CDs they already actually owned (I know its unlikely but entirely possible), those police raiding the place are not going to give a shit, they're going to arrest you anyway. It is highly unlikely that you're going to be able to convince them by saying "but look, these MP3's here, they're from the CDs sitting on my shelf there". Their policy would probably be more along the lines of "arrest first, ask questions later". I doubt they'd even bother to try check if what you were saying was true. This might seem relatively benign in the context of mp3's, given that the majority of mp3's are probably illegal, but the underlying principle that you're "forgiving" here is an incredibly dangerous concept - the idea that you can be arrested and held simply for having an mp3 on your computer, whether it is a legal mp3 or not. Checking if an MP3 is legal is not necessarily easy, since there are a variety of cases where an MP3 might be legal. It could be a recording of a friend of yours who has a band. It could be material that is no longer copyrighted, or never was. It could be music that can be downloaded for free from a musician's website (http://www.holemusic.com/audio/index.html) or from sites like http://www.mp3.com/. It might not be music, it may be comedy MP3's. How thorough do you expect the authorities will be in checking? If we begin to give this sort of power to the authorities, we're all going to be in deep shit. Go see "in the name of the father" for a good true story on what happens when you start giving authorities too much power.

There is nothing wrong, as you say, with merely trying to prevent theft. Thats not the problem here though. Sure, the authorities should have some means of preventing this sort of theft - but indiscriminate raids backed by a witch-hunt mentality and combined with media propaganda is not it. How much faith do you have in the technical abilities and knowledge of your local police?

Easy. If the middleman is costing too much, cut the middleman out of the picture and take 100% of the compensation for your work yourself, instead of less than 10%. Think you're too small? Accounts are FREE.

She has already done the math, so I wish that Courtney Love would contact me. *sigh* We could help eachother a lot, IMO, and I liked her recent rant. Oh well.
JMR

for "The Plant" by Stephen King (I'm blessed with some smart customers.)

I won't bore everyone with my rants about trying to contact Courtney Love.
*sigh* -- Even email saying "go away, and leave me alone!" would be nice.

I can even click /. readers who email me with an account number enough for
Stephen's tip, as long as the ol' e-gold promotional account holds up! :^) The
hard thing is to think in grams instead of dollars (where the Casino helps).
JMR

Of course, there are few ways (only one, that I know of, but I'm biased as hell) to efficiently pay anyone, anywhere, a dollar's worth of anything (much less ten cents worth) on the internet. The problem, as I've said before, is that in this debate it's a lot more fun to scream "LIAR" and "THIEF" back and forth than to actually do something in the real world of economics about what Courtney Love said, and make yourself ABLE to give her the tip she deserves for her music if she'd just ask me for it. *sigh*
JMR

(Ready to click a million geeks a spot of e-gold, as usual, just send me your account number.)

Do you recall Courtney Love's lengthy speech to some online entertainment conference? Well she has followed up her words with action. Last week Hole's website posted 50+ rare and live MP3's. Interestingly enough, I met Courtney on a flight from Seattle to LA in January 95, and was lucky enough to have a pen and something to write on handy. She was gracious enough to give me an autograph, and even added a bit of humour to it. It was a Wired magazine cover which she emblazoned "I can uh.... download..." along with her signature. Even in '95 she had a clue - she's obviously taken strides with the changing times and technology.

Courtney Love, of the band "Hole", railed against the RIAA and record industry at a New York conference on Digital Music Tuesday.

And I quote:

"It's become quite fashionable lately for artists to express outrage at music piracy, and I'm a fashionable gal. Stealing artists' music without paying for it is absolutely piracy -- and I'm talking about major labels, not Napster," she remarked, citing major record labels as the single greatest threat to artist subsistence.

She is desperately trying to break off from Geffen to go "DIY".

Here are the links:

news page on the hole site

and the rolling stone article