Grimes/Claire Boucher thread

on a pretty regular basis i get very detailed emails from strangers about how they want to dismember me and every member of my family

sometimes my friends and family get the emails instead

sometimes the threats go to people i barely even know or haven't talked to in years, people who might not even know why strange people on the internet want to dismember me, who get really upset about the threats and forward them to me with heartfelt concern about whether or not i am safe and ok

i then copy and paste the threats into a very long years-old email thread so they can be sent to law enforcement contacts and added to a file

anyone who would seriously get super upset over a fan tweeting "leave grimes alone" or whatever is not prepared for what the world is turning into and i worry for them

anyway

i'm definitely going to try to go body slam/barricade on my next run, i have been struggling with not having enough block and i totally had not thought about how body slam could turn a block-focused deck into an offensive powerhouse. thanks!

https://goo.gl/images/Q21Vbj

It’s not those fans I worry about it’s the death threats ones I worry about turning their obsessive love for her into a real threat for anyone managing her label.

I’m sorry to hear that you’re dealing with that James.

I hope the death threats thing is just some kind of sick trend, or a symptom of society not having had time to establish the norms that will make life in the internet age bearable.

This can’t just be the way it is now.

her friends and family have received threats. people she casually tweeted back and forth with a couple of times have received threats. fans who she has never interacted with who maintain fan pages on social media have received threats. everyone who can be seen to have any sort of connection to her online, real or imagined, has received threats.

i do not know offhand if the label has received threats before. i would be surprised if they have not. either way, it's not something she has control over.

sorry for all that

I was magma90210 forever ago on MRMB hope you are well

I was pointing precisely that problem from the very start, but I got accused of overthinking it... really sucks to have people who clearly need help channeling violence in those ways. I remember reading about Claire getting those threats and its really worrisome, sucks it’s happening to you to James.

why is she receiving so many threats? because she is outspoken? i hope the situation will be resolved soon.

That said I do think she has control over certain things. Bringing up an anonymous beef with maybe someone in the label is an invitation to threats. I don’t remember in which reddit thread about the first tweet there were two crazy fans trying to “solve” who it was by dropping names of artists or friends who have collaborated with her in the past (james was namedropped in between those btw) and weren’t around in artangels. They were going through old photos with people from the label and friends to find who she was talking about. So I wasn’t overreacting... she does have crazy fans and I’ve seen the kind of crackpot posts and threads surrounding her life and her songs. She’s not responsible about them existing but there are some really insane ones that may take her words as a call to action.

That was what I was saying and it rubbed people the wrong way. There’s many information on the internet that someone with enough free time can find and make wrongful use of it. The less you keep the loonies at bay the better. Anonymous beefs invites them into a “guess who” game which is a bad idea.

Am I overthinking it... yes probably, but it’s a point of view and there’s truth behind it.

As a longstanding fan, yeah I want to know how her music making is progressing, and yeah I want to know if some industry shit is intervening between artist and audience. The appearance to me is of someone unexpectedly finding they’re unable to deliver on a promise and wanting to give an account for that without breaching propriety. Whatever the overheated Twittersphere want to make of it is their sad problem, I just appreciate knowing that I’ll have to wait longer but not because it’s not done. The feedback loops of emotion around her every move and murmur must be paralysing, like trying to speak with a mic hooked up to a Marshall stack pointed at your face.

I really love Art Angels, listened again this week a few times

Beating a dead horse in here so last comment I make on the situation (”finally!” exclaimed with relief Alfred and Kath) but Claire likes anime, videogames, is an attractive woman, smart and makes amazing art. There’s an inevitable overlap of crazy fans. She posts a tweet saying “no music soon music industry sucks” a normal fan says “fuck that” but not all of Grimes fans are normal.

welcome to realiti

The feedback loops of emotion around her every move and murmur must be paralysing, like trying to speak with a mic hooked up to a Marshall stack pointed at your face.

this is such a great analogy

a normal fan says “fuck that” but not all of Grimes fans are normal.

i mean i've never seen an artist with a large fanbase that didn't have some genuinely troubled people populating it. it runs the gamut from John Lennon and Bjork all the way down to Christina Grimmie and Rebecca Schaefer. the most insane fans I've ever met have been U2 fans, ftr.

trying to speak with a mic hooked up to a Marshall stack pointed at your face.

dominickfernow.mpeg

the thing is, being a "public figure" does not mean that you are forevermore unaffected by things, and nor does having fans. and there is nothing lonelier than going through bad shit and being unable to talk about it

Classic website. Glad I spent my twenties here.

― treeship 2, Saturday, February 17, 2018 5:43 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It could be worse. You could've spent your thirties on Twitter.

I was thinking of running a REALiTi poll to determine not which song was the best but the correlation between which version you preferred and how powerful you felt the song to be

because I prefer the demo version and I find it very powerful, spiritually, a place of comfort and inspiration, shelter from the storm, and while I feel like I can understand how someone would prefer the album version, since it's perhaps more correct, in a way more effective, I was thinking maybe they would have a rather different relation to the song (since I think the album version loses some of the ethereality which gives demo its supernatural power)

but then I checked the poll results and demo won by such a margin that I figured the debate was over

Little late to the party but the fact were still talking about the agency of an artist like grimes fucking depresses me

Does 4AD have a history with coming into conflict w/ artists?

they have changed hands several times over the years. afaik the current crew are the guys who came onboard circa 2009. I haven't heard many/any stories of problems. labels can be very frustrating to deal with and that's putting it mildly but I also think the public & many artists have weird ideas about what labels are supposed to do / what contracts say and what an artist's responsibilities are regarding the terms of said contracts, etc, and a lot of the discourse about this stuff is really unhelpful & naive

I can't believe this issue has been raised yet again, but I think it should be obvious that Realiti>Realiti.

how can you do whatever you want (the right of all artists) if you have to keep your promises

yes, they have contracts that are legally binding. OTOH, most music contracts for anyone other than the absolute biggest stars are largely exploitative and a horrible deal. Record labels have total leverage over their artists, and I can see how that can cause issues with musicians that have strong ideas about how their art should be made and presented.

most music contracts for anyone other than the absolute biggest stars are largely exploitative and a horrible deal.

what is your source for this claim? I'm an artist of minor stature who's had several contracts which struck me as fair when I signed them and which pay modest dividends to this day.

yah that's weird. MOST artists don't get paid because they don't generate any money.

well, it takes a long time! my first album for 4AD didn't recoup for well over a decade. but I go into all contracts with a very old-school assumption: that the only money I'm ever going to see is the money I get upfront. anybody who's banking on anything other than the advance is, in my book, waiting for unicorns to come along, and everybody used to understand this

what should the expectations be of someone who's had moderate success like Grimes? I could easily see a scenario where that just brings on more and more expenses and puts her ever deeper in hock to the label.

most contracts I know about work like this: you get two advances, one that's money for you and one that's for recording. the recording one you never see, it's paid by the label to the studio and billed to the release you make there. all this is recoupable. people seem to think that's unfair, I guess; I don't & haven't heard a coherent argument for why recording expenses on a release shouldn't be recoupable. the money one you have to earn back on sales before you go into profit, and then your contractually agreed-upon royalty rate goes into effect; it's often quite low, and it always is right there in the contract. some contracts may include a stipulation that the label will give tour support; we almost never asked for that, because we understood that any money we got was being billed to the album. we did get plane tickets bought for us & hotels paid for when we went to the UK; at no time did I imagine these were gifts from our good friends at the label. they're shared expenses. they're billable to sales. that seems fair to me. if I decide to have, say, big stage production & fly first class & travel in a bus...and I ask the label to front me the money for this...presumably they're going to recover that money from sales, and my album won't recoup as quickly or at all. I do not assume the label will be sharing this expense. major labels were notorious for billing lots of employee expenses to bands (like, everybody gets to fly to NY to see the big Fleetwood Mac show in '77 & stays in nice hotels & they're all label employees & hanger-on & then Fleetwood Mac has to pay for those guys? not kosher) but 4AD, to the best of my knowledge, isn't generally like this.

nobody has to ask for tour support from the label, and in my experience labels don't offer it unless you ask. I can't think of other expenses that'd be billable that one would incur without full awareness -- anything they buy you you have to pay for later and again I don't think that's unfair. the one thing that generally IS unfair is the royalty split. smaller indies often operate on a profit-share model, which imo is fairer than a flat royalty %. but smaller indies also often give no advance beyond p & d.

do you think it's possible that as an artist like Grimes gains popularity, they also get deeper in debt to the label and lose leverage? For example, it seems crazy to me that with people buying ever fewer albums, record labels expect someone at her level to crank out a half dozen videos. How do you ever pay that back?

with grimes, the label doesn't pay for recording because she makes the records at home by herself. the label also isn't able to spend much money on the videos, which only get made if many key personnel are willing to work for free. in this case, this generally means many many hours of unpaid labor from grimes herself working as director, editor, colorist, and main performer. the label chips in recoupable dollars for the first one or two videos, and any that appear after that are the result of cash infusions from external sources like the canadian grant system or tidal.

the main differences between majors and indies afaik are the royalty split (50-50 with an indie label, on a major like 80-20 or 90-10? it varies) and the amount of money the label is prepared to spend on marketing. even the larger indies are very small operations compared to the majors and spend much less on marketing. they also spend much less on hiring the staff that perform vital in-house functions like public relations, radio promotion, and digital marketing. major labels have departments full of people doing those jobs. with small indies they might not have anyone doing that stuff, and with a bigger indie there might be one or two people doing digital marketing and the entire cadre of beggars group labels all share that person.

at a major it would be much easier for the label to gain massive leverage over an artist because of the sheer volume of dollars being spent on the artist's behalf. when you see artists on major labels having label trouble, what's usually going on is that the artist has not turned in music that the label believes in, and they have refused to put their vast and expensive collection of resources behind that music. this is why a nicki minaj or an azealia banks will not be able to secure a release date for an album, or why a charli xcx will release a "mixtape" instead of an album that is not accompanied by much in the way of videos and digital marketing and radio promo.

in grimes' case nothing like that is happening. she doesn't take much money from the label and anything she does take is quickly recouped by sales.

if grimes got a 50/50 split from 4AD her manager deserves the biggest bonus of all time

what? are you serious? i don't think i've ever encountered anyone signed to a bigger indie that didn't have a 50/50 royalty rate in the deal.

oh boy

lol

https://i.imgur.com/lJjUg0B.png

So was the post above actual insider details about Grimes' contract or an educated guess? It sounds like labels have become much more generous and fair vs the old days.

Perhaps with physical media sales dwindling, the stakes are lower for the labels.

thread just went supernova

This is why it was suggested at new employee orientation not to discuss your salary with your colleagues!

- very frazzled 4AD Human Resources associate

lol I'm inclined to post a screenshot from my 2016 royalties statement from the Label In Question just for laffs but unfortunately the internet isn't as cozy as it used to be. I will again assert that I would be very surprised if Grimes got a 50/50 split from them, as I know a number of artists under that umbrella who would also be quite pleased to find themselves the beneficiaries of such a split. however, it is a new era, it's true, and the people I knew there, even at the top, are largely gone, so who knows. still, I would be surprised.

i don't think i've ever encountered anyone signed to a bigger indie that didn't have a 50/50 royalty rate in the deal.

out of curiosity I talked to some artist managers I know this morning - their experience does not reflect yours. the only indies I know who do a 50/50 split with anybody are the ones that don't pay mechanicals, standard royalty rates are MUCH lower than that.

indie royalties are a lot closer to an even split than major royalties, no? even if they're not as generous as 50-50

isn't 4AD a major indie

depends on the size of the indie in my experience. a big article on Future of Music Coalition's site states

Here it is important to remember that artists’ contract royalty rate is not statutory, transparent nor is it public. Traditional contract royalties begin at a much smaller “11 –13 percent” and allow for that royalty amount to be further diminished through a process of unfair deductions that are standardized within the industry.

indies do better than that but in my experience only the super-pure-at-heart indies do anything near 50/50. (And, as has been observed for generations, it often turns out that the indie that offers you nice high split like this will ghost at some point and you'll have to hire people to go get what you're owed & then it turns out they didn't even keep track of the master tapes and you wish you'd had a 17% royalty that paid reliably instead of having to waste whole days wondering if scientists have determined how to get blood out of a turnip yet, not that I'd know anything about any of this lol)

I wonder what’s the rate at Dischord.

just been waiting for my moment to drop "its the roc, baby!" in here

huh weird i got 100% royalties when i signed to 4AD

I gotta give props to 4AD for giving all of ILM sweet record contracts. The Lulu pre-covers really paid off!