Jared Leto fronted band 30 Seconds To Mars have spoken out about a lawsuit filed by EMI, suing the band for $30 million after they failed to renew their contract with the label. The band claim that they were within their rights to break that deal, and decided to do so because they have not received any payment from the two million album sales they have generated, and because the recent job cuts at the label mean that the team they had been working have all moved on.
In a lengthy statement, Leto told fans: "As you may have heard, we are being sued by our former record company for the ridiculously oversized, totally unrealistic and pretty silly (but slightly clever) sum of $30,000,000. ... We had been signed to our record contract for 9 years. Basically, under California law, where we live and signed our deal, one cannot be bound to a contract for more than seven years. This is widely known by all the record companies and has been for years. In fact, so aware of it are they that they desperately try to make deals outside of California whenever possible. It is a law that protects people from lengthy, unfair, career-spanning contracts. This law also gave us the legal right to explore other possible opportunities.Yes we have been sued by EMI. But NOT for failing to deliver music or for 'quitting'. We have been sued by the corporation quite simply because roughly 45 days ago we exercised our legal right to terminate our old, out of date contract, which, according to the law is null and void.We terminated for a number of reasons, which we won't go into here (we'd rather not air any dirty laundry) but basically our representatives could not get EMI to agree to make a fair and reasonable deal".
He continued: "If you think the fact that we have sold in excess of two million records and have never been paid a penny is pretty unbelievable, well, so do we. And the fact that EMI informed us that not only aren't they going to pay us AT ALL but that we are still $1.4 million in debt to them is even crazier. That, and other issues, like the new regime at EMI firing most of the people we know and love, wanting to place advertisements on our website, EMI owning 100 percent of the masters of our record... forever, and basically having a revolving door of regimes at the company made it easy to not want to continue as is".
So now we know.