When it Pains It Roars

smanifesto:

Hello all

For the sake of keeping things emotion-free and legal, we’ll cut straight to the chase and forgo the insults and accusations:

It is and has been for quite some time our position that Victory Records is an artist-hostile, morally corrupt and generally dishonest company, with whom we have had the displeasure of being associated due to a contract that was signed years ago. We’re not writing this today to air grievances, of which there are many; numerous bands’ struggles with Victory are well-documented (and many more are sealed by a court of law), so we figured we’re going to skip the allegations and try to solve the problem, as we see it.

We’re writing today to ask you to please boycott all Streetlight related items by not purchasing any of our records or merchandise from Victory’s website, any traditional CD stores, online third party retailers or any digital distribution service (iTunes, Amazon etc). Victory has a long-time reputation of pocketing all of the proceeds from a band’s music and merch, with shady accounting and generally bully-ish behavior. If you want to support Streetlight, our music and our ability to tour and continue to release music, please make all SM related purchases from our own webstore, The RISC Store ( www.riscstore.com), or come out to a show and buy a shirt or cd from us directly. In regards to getting the music we make, you can buy directly from us, or, alternately, we’re sure you can find a way to get the tunes onto your computer that may not be, ahem, traditional… Speaking a Bit metaphorically, there is a Torrent of methods to accomplish this, and Google is your always loyal friend…

As many of you know, we are in the final stages of recording our new album. It will be out and available this summer, whether via Victory, or some other method. We refuse to let our constant battles with our own record label hold back the album’s release (we can take nearly forever to finish an album on our own, thank you very much) and we look forward to being free from Victory’s clutches once our contract with them ends this summer.

We wish Victory Records no ill will or harm. Ok, that’s not entirely true. But what we want more than seeing the bad guy get his comeuppance, to see the villain get bitch-slapped by karma, is freedom from a company we abhor. We want the money made by our record and merch sales to help fund the band, not a company we’re ashamed to be associated with. We don’t care about SoundScans, or charts, or success as it’s measured by an industry we can’t stand; we just want our hard work to go towards something better than the record labels that destroy the spirit of independent music.

Thanks for your time and support and we’ll see you soon.