Next time you hear an RIAA spokesdroid bellyaching that music piracy is taking money out of the pockets of artists…laugh in their face…

Rapper behind ‘Roxanne’s Revenge’ gets Warner Music to pay for Ph.D

Twenty-five years after the first queen of hip-hop was stiffed on her royalty checks, Dr. Roxanne Shante boasts an Ivy League Ph.D. – financed by a forgotten clause in her first record deal. 

…

After two albums, Shante said, she was disillusioned by the sleazy music industry and swindled by her record company. The teen mother, living in the Queensbridge Houses, recalled how her life was shattered.

"Everybody was cheating with the contracts, stealing and telling lies," she said. "And to find out that I was just a commodity was heartbreaking."

As it turned out…the record company tossed in a clause in her contract where they basically agreed to finance her college education, probably figuring (according to the article) that a teenage mom living in the projects would never make any use of it.  Even so, she had to drag it out of them kicking and screaming.  She found an ally in the dean at Marymount Manhattan College, who let her attend classes for free while pursuing the money.  The record company (Warner Music) agreed to pay up when she threatened to go public with her story. 

The company declined to comment for this story.

Doesn’t look so good to be throwing lawsuits around on the grounds that piracy steals money from the same artists you’re busy screwing over, does it?

Music brings sweetness to life and people will gladly pay for it.  But nobody likes being gouged, and especially when they know full well that the artists they love are being screwed over too.  The contempt you see among some younger (and older) folk for the Music Labels is merely a mirror of the contempt they fully understand the labels regard them and the artists with.  It doesn’t have to be that way.  My own wish is that the technology eventually makes it so easy for the artists and their listeners to cut the labels, at least the big greedy ones, out of the transaction altogether, that nobody can remember what the hell they were ever good for in the first place and they just go the way of the dinosaurs.  Hell, they’re already fossilized.