On the artists’ side

Dave Stewart and others are starting a pro-artists entertainment business (strange idea!).

“There is total corruption in the music industry — it’s like Enron. There’s a corporate front end, but at the back end there’s all this wheeling and dealing. It’s a rip-off. The amount of money we’ve made [as the Eurythmics] compared to the amount of money we’ve made for the people around us is minuscule. It happens to every artist. People say that Motown was a great label, but it was the greatest cotton field of all — loads of the artists got tiny royalties. Loads died without a gravestone, yet their songs have sold millions and millions.”

Oddly, given how well informed the Financial Times usually is, there is no mention of the new group’s attitude towards copyright and the Internet.