n her very first conversation with the band, on June 15, when its members — Hillary Scott, Dave Haywood, and Charles Kelley — repeatedly asked to take a picture they could post on social media to show the world how they were “moving forward with positive solutions and common ground,” White could see that they weren’t really concerned about her position as an independent artist. The band wanted to record a song with White, she told me just after the lawsuit was announced, and they wanted to record the process, documentary style, to chronicle the proof that they were nothing like the rest of the country standing on opposite sides of life and liberty, unable or unwilling to meet in the middle. But as they spoke during the negotiations over the last two weeks, White began to realize that any meeting in the middle would result only from her own painstaking strides. The band had already made their splashy statement, declaring newfound wokeness by ceremoniously discarding the latter half of their name. Their declarations of faith were meaningless, White now says, because they never engaged with her in good faith.“The first contract they sent [on June 30] had no substance,” she explains. “It said that we would coexist and that they would use their best efforts to assist me on social-media platforms, Amazon, iTunes, all that. But what does that mean? I had suggested on the Zoom call that they go by the Band Lady A, or Lady A the Band, and I could be Lady A the Artist, but they didn’t want to do that.”
At the same time, while the band was rebranding itself across the internet, pushing their own brand of Lady A up search results, White fell further down, becoming harder to find on Google and streaming platforms alike. A search for Lady A reveals the band first, and while White appears close to the top in artist results (second on Spotify, for example, and third on iTunes, after both “Lady A” the band and “Lady Antebellum”), her music is sometimes dozens of entries deep, far beneath the country group’s vast catalogue. “I attempted to upload my single [on independent distribution service DistroKid] and couldn’t verify my name, Lady A, for several days,” she wrote to me, via email, on June 30. “It finally went through and now I’m just waiting until my July release to see if my single will be buried.”
White says that the goal since learning of the band’s name switch-up was always to continue to perform and release music under the name Lady A. But as the band proved unwilling to compromise, she began to consider other options for protecting her business interests. Regarding the $10 million she asked for when her attorney sent the latest draft of the coexistence agreement on July 3 — what Nashville songwriter Shane McAnally recklessly likened to extortion on Twitter — White says that it was simply a request for the necessary resources to support herself and, perhaps more importantly, the entire Black community. Her plan, she told me, was to use $5 million to rebrand, to start over as an artist with more than 20 years in the game — but without the high-powered label and management machine of a Lady Antebellum. The other $5 million was to be donated to the charities of her choice, including organizations that provide support to other independent Black artists. If the band formerly known as Lady Antebellum was going to vow to support to Black lives, Lady A says, she was going to hold them to it.
With the pro bono support of intellectual-property attorneys from the Palo Alto–headquartered Cooley law firm, White is confident that justice will eventually prevail. If she has any concern about the way negotiations have crumbled for all the world to see, it is for the way she is being portrayed by the band, how she believes they are positioning her as “the angry Black woman.” But even that won’t stop her fight.
“I was quiet for two weeks because I was trying to believe that it was going to be okay and that they would realize that it would be easier to just change their name, or pay me for my name,” White says. “Five million dollars is nothing, and I’m actually worth more than that, regardless of what they think. But here we go again with another white person trying to take something from a Black person, even though they say they’re trying to help. If you want to be an advocate or an ally, you help those who you’re oppressing. And that might require you to give up something because I am not going to be erased.”
― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Saturday, 11 July 2020 02:00 (three years ago) link