Doing Business With Us

Let's get this right out in the open, up front: we're here to make money by making music. We love music; in fact, we love it so much that we want it to be our career. And because of that, we try to run this as a business.

On the other hand, we want to be a friendly, respectable, honest business, the kind of business that we would want to do business with. So here is fact number one: we neither send nor condone the practice of sending unsolicited email. (Go on, say it: "spam".) We don't do it. If you want to sell us an advertising service, you won't do it either. And if you ever see any spam that claims to be from us, about us, or promoting us, PLEASE tell us about it, because we want to find whoever is sending it and hurt them a lot until they stop.

We do run a mailing list for concert schedule mailings. You can join it if you like, although just at present this concert list won't be a lot of use to you unless you live in the San Francisco Bay Area or environs. At present we only run one list for all our various bands. Except incidentally, we do not advertise through that list; and the only thing we advertise is us and whoever we happen to be playing with, plus of course the venue. Elton controls that list, and he really detests spam.

We also sell online. We sell our own products and selected other products through our own online catalog; and we offer downloads and sales through MP3.com. Some distributors also carry our products, and most of those distributors also have online stores.

If you are a customer:

We do not collect any data about you at all, for any reason, unless you sign up for one of the mailing lists we talked about above. Then we do collect your email address. However, we do not ever sell or trade your email address with anyone, for any reason, and we do not send any mail on those lists that isn't for the stated purpose of the list. We control the concert schedule mailing list, so we must approve anything posted to it. Any list subscriber can post to the chat list without our approval, but we will publicly vilify and then throw off the list anyone whom we think is abusing it.

We sell our merchandise through vendors who manage our catalog and provides our credit card billing services. They will collect credit card and other personal information about you for the purpose of selling our merchandise to you, and they do offer a range of other products and services. We can't control the information they collect, so please see their privacy policy for details about what they collect and how they use it.

If you are a vendor:

If you want to sell our products, or partner with us as an exchange of some sort, we'll be happy to talk to you about it. However, we have some restrictions:

We can't accept any exclusive contracts. We already have other non-exclusive contracts, and we wouldn't think it ethical to toss out those other contracts in order to do business. Not even if you're a major label and want to offer us gobs of money.

We can't put your catalog pages on our site. We already have a catalog, and we don't want to confuse our customers by making them figure out which catalog they're supposed to use. On the other hand, Lizard Music can do that and will be happy to. We suggest you sign up with them. We recommend them highly.

In our own catalog, we won't sell random products from random sources -- not even music. The "selected" part of our "other products" means that those people are good friends of ours, folks we work with all the time, and we want to see them become successful. If you fall into that category, talk to us; otherwise please don't even ask. We'll link to your catalog, but that's the best we can do.

We do sometimes contract with people to promote us. If you want to do that, talk to us. First, though, go back and re-read what we said earlier: you WILL NOT send spam on our behalf! There just is not enough money anywhere to make us do that. We will put that stipulation in writing, with significant monetary penalties attached. Business-to-business contacts are okay, even if they're email "cold calls"; but a mass mailing to random email addresses is very much NOT okay. Okay? Okay.

We also accept a minimal amount of advertising to be placed on our site. For instance, we have, in the past, participated in LinkExchange (but fans complained, so we stopped). However, we know our audience, so we're extremely picky about what we will advertise. Beer, food, motorcycles, music, movies, basically all of our hobbies, no problem. Sex sites, sites with a "moral" or even an "anti-moral" message, extreme political views ... forget it. We all have different religious leanings, and Nitnorth is a foam-at-the-mouth libertarian anarchist with delusions of godhood; how are we ever going to agree on what it's "okay" to advertise in those areas? --So we just stay right away from them. (Seriously: Nitnorth won't patronize Blockbuster because they won't stock certain movies; that's how rabid he is about it. And he's so awful to deal with when he starts ranting.)

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President George W. Bush acted just like an adult today as he arrived in Brussels and addressed a conference of NATO officials on the validity of a proposed missile shield. The pitch was met with serious skepticism since it is well known that Bush can't even prevent his own daughters from getting bombed.
 -- Craig Kilborn