An Open Letter To Bob Lefsetz

Bob,

Man, I hear you. A lot of us writing songs and singing here in Nashville do. We’ve been living this for a long time, watching the smoke rise from the funeral pyres down on Music Row.

Just so you know…there are a lot of us down here that haven’t been sitting around waiting for the Death Star sized companies to take notice and validate our artistic careers. The people that wait on record deals are the ones wearing paper hats, shoveling fries out of drive through windows. The real musicians here have hit the road, built followings and sold tens of thousands of records out of the backs of their vans. They have created careers, gotten TV and movie placements and left a boot print on the music business’ wrinkly ass.

A group of us just started a web site. It’s called Brite Revolution. We pay artists that have big grassroots followings to release new, original songs every month. We don’t recoup. We don’t take their publishing or masters. All we ask is for the exclusive rights to those songs for two months on our site. We even give 30% of our gross subscription revenues back to the artists and 10% to non-profit causes (5% goes to the causes chosen by artists and 5% go to causes chosen by users). Brite only costs $4.99 to subscribe. MP3s are DRM free and you can download all you want, as many times as you want from whomever you want.

Isn’t this what you’ve been talking about all this time? We are doing it and it’s working! People are signing up and our artists are being set free to create, the fans are getting new music all the time (40 NEW songs a month), we are able to promote proven and new talent and non-profit causes are being helped out.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this? If there is a way to make this deal better for artists and the fans, then we will do it.

We are not so arrogant as to say that Brite Revolution is the answer to everything that is wrong with the music business, but it is an answer. And that’s what the music business seems to be heading towards…a lot of different answers. As for ours, it is one that serves these artists and their fans. One that doesn’t bend over the consumer by trying to beat the digital age into submission and regain full-control over the creative process and peoples musical palates.

Don’t ream us, Bob. Just take a look. We are taking a big risk with this company, but none of us went into the music industry because of it promised security. This risk is worth it, I think. We have only been launched for 40 days and time will tell. But as far as we are concerned, there is strength in numbers and we’ve found some of the best people with whom we could circle the wagons.

Thanks,
Billy Cerveny
Brite Revolution