'Offensive Lyric' Prompts Epic Records To Attempt The Impossible: 'Erase' The Track From The Web

Tim Cushing — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 11:36:28 PST

The general rule of thumb is: once something's on the internet, it's there for good. But this simple fact eludes a great many people, many of whom demand the internet erase all the bad stuff or they'll sue/pass legislation. But you simply can't do it. There are millions of people interacting with everything everyday, and there are millions of places to hide stuff someone else wants to have disappear.

The latest entity to believe it has a shot at bending the internet to its will is Epic Records, which is now making efforts to 'erase' a remix of Future's "Karate Chop" from the web. Why? Well, apparently an "unauthorized" mix leaked into the public ear with a particularly offensive Lil Wayne lyric attached. (I hear you asking: "In terms of Lil Wayne, how does one define "particularly offensive?" Well, read on.)

Lil Wayne caused controversy with a lyric on Future's"Karate Chop" remix where he raps, “Beat that pussy up like Emmett Till," eliciting a fiery response from Till's family.

If the name Emmett Till doesn't ring a bell and you're wondering why anyone would care, here's a bit of Till's bio which, tragically, has a whole lot more to say about his death than his life.

Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was an African-American boy who was murdered in Mississippi at the age of 14 after reportedly flirting with a white woman. Till was fromChicago, Illinois, visiting his relatives in the Mississippi Delta region when he spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the married proprietor of a small grocery store. Several nights later, Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam arrived at Till's great-uncle's house where they took Till, transported him to a barn, beat him and gouged out one of his eyes, before shooting him through the head and disposing of his body in the Tallahatchie River, weighting it with a 70-pound (32 kg) cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire.

His murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury and admitted to the crime several months later, protected by the "double jeopardy" shield.

Understandably, Till's family isn't happy with Wayne's choice of sexual metaphor, and with Rev. Jesse Jackson weighing in on the issue, Epic is feeling a little heat. So, its heart is in the right place and the offer to rid the web of the offending remix is noble, but there's no way it will ever accomplish that.

"We regret the unauthorized remix version of Future's 'Karate Chop,' which was leaked online and contained hurtful lyrics," the statement said. "Out of respect for the legacy of Emmett Till and his family and the support of the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. ... we are going through great efforts to take down the unauthorized version."

Great effort will no doubt be made, but I can imagine there's going to be some collateral damage. We've already observed (several times) that many companies who attempt mass takedowns often remove legitimate content, up to and including their own offerings. Going into panic mode only exacerbates the problem.

Not only that, but is there any real reason to make this version nonexistent? I understand that many, many people will find Wayne's lyric incredibly offensive (because it is), but does erasing it from the web really serve any purpose? The information is already out there, in the form of posts like the one at HipHopDX. Killing off the remix, even assuming it were possible, changes nothing. The lack of aural evidence won't erase the written evidence. An official statement from Epic disowning this version should be all that's needed.

Let the "unauthorized" remix stay live. Bring this story to the front. This isn't anyone's problem but Lil Wayne's. He wrote it. He said it. He can live with it. No one needs to be tilting windmills on his behalf or on the behalf of those offended, and in the process, potentially taking non-offensive (OK -- less offensive) legitimate content offline.

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Pandora: We're Helping Artists Make Millions & We'd Like To Keep Doing That

Mike Masnick — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 07:02:05 PDT

For all the talk of new music platforms not paying artists enough, we keep hearing counter stories. The latest is that Pandora has revealed that two artists -- Drake and Lil' Wayne -- will make somewhere close to $3 million in royalty payments from Pandora this year. Lots of other artists make many thousands of dollars as well:

Have you heard of Donnie McClurkin, French Montana or Grupo Bryndis? If you haven't you're not alone. They are artists whose sales ranks on Amazon are 4,752, 17,000 and 183,187, respectively. These are all working artists who live well outside the mainstream - no steady rotation on broadcast radio, no high profile opening slots on major tours, no front page placement in online retail. What they also have in common is a steady income from Pandora. In the next twelve months Pandora is on track to pay performance fees of $100,228, $138,567 and $114,192, respectively, for the music we play to their large and fast-growing audiences on Pandora.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. For over two thousand artists Pandora will pay over $10,000 dollars each over the next 12 months (including one of my favorites, the late jazz pianist Oscar Peterson), and for more than 800 we'll pay over $50,000, more than the income of the average American household. For top earners like Coldplay, Adele, Wiz Khalifa, Jason Aldean and others Pandora is already paying over $1 million each. Drake and Lill Wayne are fast approaching a $3 million annual rate each.

Of course, while all of this is happening, Pandora is not yet profitable, and may never be profitable -- as it is required, under current webcasting rates, to pay about 50% of its revenue out as royalties (while terrestrial radio and satellite radio get to pay much, much less). As Tim Westergren has pointed out, because of the crazy rates, plenty of other webcasting operations have just left the business entirely -- meaning that there just aren't that many players in this space, because it just isn't profitable for the companies, even as they're developing important new revenue streams for artists.

I'll have more on this later, but it often seems that legacy players really have no concept of "the golden goose." They assume that any tech company, who is moderately successful in getting users, simply should be bled dry, paying out just about everything to artists, with nothing left for the companies themselves. They think that the music is the entire value, and the service provided is not very important. And yet, without that service, none of that money would come in at all. At some point, the legacy guys are going to have to realize that they're better off having a healthy ecosystem of services, rather than squeezing the absolute highest rates out of these companies, in a way where they can't survive.

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Techdirt. Stories filed under "lil' wayne"

'Offensive Lyric' Prompts Epic Records To Attempt The Impossible: 'Erase' The Track From The Web

Pandora: We're Helping Artists Make Millions & We'd Like To Keep Doing That