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<label><span>Allee Willis blog on <a href="http://lefsetz.com/" target="_blank">lefsetz.com</a></span></label>
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<br>Bob Lefsetz is the author of The Lefsetz Letter and runs the <a href="http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vbGVmc2V0ei5jb20v" target="_blank">lefsetz.com</a>
blog, famous for being
beholden to no one and speaking the truth, Lefsetz addresses the issues
that are at the core of the music business: downloading, copy
protection, pricing and the music itself. <br><br>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br><br>Songwriters<br><br>Hi,
Bob. I'm Allee Willis. Songs I've written include September, Boogie
Wonderland, Neutron Dance, What Have I Done To Deserve This, the
Friends theme and the Broadway musical, The Color Purple. One of my
earliest hits, Lead Me On by Maxine Nightengale, was co-written with
David Lasley, who Andre Pessis talked about in his email to you. We
also wrote the first cover I ever got, Got You On My Mind, by Bonnie
Raitt in 1974. I'm weighing in because in 1981, after getting hundreds
of songs cut in just a couple of years, I was the first songwriter who
tried to unionize writers because of all that Ellen Shipley wrote about
and more. I was also the first pop songwriter I know of to embrace the
Internet in 1991. I started designing a collaborative social network in
1992 and, much of that time with my then partner, Mark Cuban, got
laughed out of publishing and record company offices when we suggested
they take the Internet and all digital technologies seriously.<br><br>The
songwriting union never got off the ground as much because of the
ever-confusing work for hire issue as the fear many songwriters had of
being blackballed. Our mistreatment wasn't the dirty little secret of
the music industry. If it were a secret that at least would have been
something. In reality, it was a non issue, not even a notch in the
totem pole of consciousness. <br><br>I've written with and for
hundreds of incredible artists and my songs have been at the top of the
Pop, R&B, Jazz, Country, Dance and Alternative charts. I absolutely
love writing songs and composing scores. But with success came an
emptiness from the 1001 ways to screw a songwriter, long accepted as
standard industry practice. This was coupled with a growing trend that
if you were a songwriter who wrote for artists or producers other than
yourself what you had to write to get records was progressively more
homogenized. The dumbing down killed me even more than the screwing.<br><br>Other
things that made me nuts (and thankfully led to a massive branching out
of my career beyond songwriting): A) Writing up to ten songs for
someone and only seeing one or two make the album despite being told
repeatedly you're the only writer working with them. (Where there's no
payment there's no accountability.) B) Artists and producers sitting on
songs for months and years until they had enough of them that the
earliest songs felt old and they were cast out like a homeless kitten
with one leg. C) Giving away pieces of publishing and songwriting
shares just to get cuts lest your spot be filled by a more de-spirited
and desperate songwriter than yourself. D) Settling for mere
songwriting credit when your demo was used as the actual record - I was
literally told by a major female artist that I didn't deserve credit as
a producer or arranger as I was "only the songwriter and that's what
songwriters do". E) Babysitting artists who had absolutely zero
songwriting chops, doing<br> whatever it took to keep your brain
functioning as they deliberated whether an 'a' or 'the' was better for
their already idiotic lyric. I've often said that unless you were the
artist yourself, being a songwriter was like changing towels in the
restroom, only difference being that the restroom attendant got paid.<br><br>Probably
because many of my early cuts were with instrumental artists like
Herbie Hancock and Weather Report or male bands like Earth Wind &
Fire, coupled with the fact that to this day I don't know how to read,
notate or play music, it was falsely assumed I was just a lyricist. I
was given tons of tracks to put words to. Oftentimes I would spend 18
hour days putting words to whole songs only to be told when I handed
them in that only the choruses were going to be sung. Is songwriters'
time so less valuable than anyone else's that they can't be told this
when they're given the track? <br><br>And then there's movie
soundtracks, where songs are sent out as temp tracks to be copied by
other writers. One of the last straws for me was when I received a copy
of my own song, Neutron Dance, already out on a Pointer Sisters' LP,
and told to rip it off for Beverly Hills Cop. After my co-writer, Danny
Sembello, and I stewed for a couple of weeks we decided no one could
rip us off better than ourselves. We wrote a parallel song that
mimicked the lyric - Neutron Dance's "I don't want to take it anymore,
I'll just stay here locked behind the door" became "I can't stay here
while I go nowhere" in the new song. We slightly adjusted the drum
track. We never heard anything after we submitted it - another standard
practice after you're hounded to hand something in. Three weeks before
the film was released we found out that only because Jerry Bruckheimer
pulled a tape out of his wastebasket that his song screener had passed
on and checked it to make sure he could tape over it did he<br> hear
our copy song, Stir It Up, and insist it go into the soundtrack. They
never found a better song than Neutron Dance and that stayed in too.
Not only did I win a Grammy for Best Soundtrack but, in one of my
favorite musical moments, I was named one of the most dangerous
subversives living in the United States by the Communist government
when they mistranslated the song as Neutron Bomb. <br><br>A decade
later, in fairly infamous songwriting lore, two of the three producers
of Friends, a full year after the song was a hit, demanded songwriter
royalties because they had given me notes. I don't know very many
composers who write for film or tv who don't get notes from producers
or directors. By that point I was full throttle into my interactive
career, building my prototype for willisville, my social network, and
spending every dime on it that I earned from consulting for Microsoft,
AOL, Silicon Graphics, Electronic Arts, Fox, Disney, Warner Bros. and
Intel, who partially funded the prototype build (tho in reality I was
stuck adding music and visuals to an excessively dorky technology they
had already invested in). So I just gave in and watched my share of the
Friends theme plummet because, as I heard it, these producers always
wanted to be composers. To add insult to injury, The Rembrandts never
agreed to the song being released as a single as they resented not
writing it<br> by themselves so despite it being one of the biggest airplay records of the year singles income was nil. <br><br>In
2006, I had songs in three of the Top 10 films of the Year - Babel ,
Happy Feet and Night At The Museum. I didn't know about any of them
until I sat in the theater and heard them. Then it meant spending money
to hire someone to track them down and to see if I'd been paid.
Shouldn't the songwriter, not to mention co-copyright owner, be
informed and allowed to negotiate when their songs are used?<br><br>Currently,
I have a theme to a hit VH-1 show that's already run one season and is
filming the next right now. The production company still hasn't
submitted cue sheets to BMI for season one and the credits are so small
and run so fast no one can even see my name which, I guess, isn't a
real problem as songwriting credits aren't even listed. <br><br>Fate
in the theater world is not much better. Depending on the producer,
composers and lyricists have little to no say about the way their music
is arranged or mixed or how their show is promoted. Musicals taker an
average of five years to write so this can be especially heartbreaking.
<br><br>The blessing of all of this was that very early on I was so
unhappy I started to paint, soon after motorizing my art to my music.
This led to art directing tons of music videos for people like The
Cars, Debbie Harry and Heart. I kept writing songs, still loving the
actual act of songwriting, and also because my publishing deals helped
finance each new field I went into. But music publishers were not great
at recognizing the value of multi-media careers. Brain dead might be a
more accurate description. Despite selling close to 50,000,000 records
my advances were numbifyingly low compared to writers who had much less
success. As opposed to thinking a broad artistic vision might actually
enhance the contribution I could make my multi-medianess was looked at
as a threat to the number of songs I could churn out. The exception to
publishers wearing blinders (altho the low advances still persisted)
was Kathleen Carey at Unicity (MCA), who hooked me up with Pet Shop
Boys by selling<br> their manager some of my art which led to me being
hired to do their portrait. During the sitting Neil Tennant put it
together that I was the same A. Willis on some of his favorite records
and we started writing WHIDTDT that night. And also, Judy Stakee at
Warner/ Chappell, who took my interest in digital technology seriously
and introduced me to Mark Cuban in 1992. Despite this, W/C would hear
nothing of removing my song quota and letting me function as their
Internet liaison, scoffing at my predictions that things like CDs and
record stores would cease to exist and radio play would become
irrelevant. Anyone who cites Napstar as the official beginning of the
fall of the record industry still has their head in the sand. <br><br>These
days I'm living my dream, finally singing my own songs for the first
time since my one and only Epic album, Childstar, in 1974, integrating
the songs with my art, videos and online worlds. My first video, It's A
Woman Thang, has close to 1,000,000 views with no promotion at all and
was a winner in the Viral category of the 2008 Webbies. The second one
was featured on YouTube and won four W3 awards. The latest, Hey Jerrie,
featuring me and a 91 year old female drummer on an oxygen tank, was
the twelfth most popular video in the world on YouTube within 48 hours
of its release a few months ago. These days, a least if I get screwed
I'm screwing myself, which is ultimately more satisfying as I can
always get a meeting with the person doing the screwing. I've been
toying with business models on the web for eighteen years. I may not be
rich from it yet but I'm rich as an artist with a larger and larger
loyal following which, ultimately, is the greatest reward of all. <br><br>Reinvention
was always easier for me than letting my personality and pride be
clubbed out of me like a baby seal. I have a had a blessed life. I have
watched myself go from battered songwriter grabbing at whatever crumbs
were thrown my way to a strong, centered and fearless artist. I'm a
better songwriter now than I ever was. I still have the same old
bullshit befall me as a songwriter but I don't stick around long enough
to suffer. It's been a long, conscious battle but as Celie says in The
Color Purple, "I'm Here". Very much here. I thank the publishers and
record industry for doing to us what Wall St. and the banking industry
did for the American people - take such advantage and pay us so little
regard that we're stripped back to nothing, individuals who now have
more chance than ever to do something spectacular on their own and
change the world.<br><br>Allee Willis<br>