The boss of US independent label Lookout! Records has been commenting on his fall-out with Green Day. As previously reported, Lookout! released Green Day's earlier albums and continued to manage the band's back catalogue after they signed to Warner. However Green Day last week announced they were ending their working relationship with Lookout! because of royalty payment disputes.
Lookout! boss Chris Applegren has admitted there were problems in making Green Day's royalty payments, and that those problems were caused by a number of bad business decisions. In an open letter to the label's fans he wrote: "Without getting into specifics it was acquiring labels, maintaining our new release schedule, signing bands while not giving enough attention to financial concerns that were not going away. Bad decisions and poor judgement came into play - most strikingly in hoping that things would all somehow magically work out, that the shortcomings in operating income and the fact that our new bands were not selling as many records as we hoped would all somehow just turn out okay on their own if we just kept working hard and doing the best job we could."
After Green Day announced they were parting company with Lookout!, Applegren had to make six of his nine staff redundant, however he was keen to stress that the downsizing was caused by the wider financial strife the company was suffering, and not just the loss of the Green Day albums from their catalogue: "The changes we looked at were not because Lookout would no longer have Green Day's first two albums but had to happen because our business was not healthy. Green Day's decision was a result of our internal problems not a cause."