Remember when Sara Barielles wrote Love Song as a protest to record execs who wanted her to do more ballad-y songs? Well, she’s been trumped by Amanda Palmer, who’s pulled out all the stops in an attempt to get RoadRunner Records to drop her.

OK, so before now, we had no idea who Amanda Palmer was. But she’s got our attention now!

From what I can glean of the situation, RoadRunner records decided that Palmer looked a little chubby in a recent video and wanted to either airbrush the offending belly shots or cut them completely. Amanda explains on her blog. Needless to say, her fanbase mobilized and responded angrily to RoadRunner’s offensive comments with a Rebellyon website featuring messages of support written on people’s bellies.

I was shocked at the attitude of the label bosses, which can best be described as condescending and rude:

a few weeks later i had a meeting with the owner of the label. he said he thought it was a shame that someone as smart and talented as me could not make a commercial record that they could sell. and he thinks that someday i’ll see the light and write some better songs.

And while I’m sure that there are two sides to the story, Palmer paints a compelling picture of an out-of-touch record label “trying to sell pieces of plastic in a digital world”.

In a follow-up blog post, she sings a song to the label trying to convince them to drop her, but apparently they have refused to cancel the contract, despite her having fulfilled her contractual obligations. Apparently they make a decision whether to renew the contract some time in June.

Via The Lefsetz Letter