Creativity Quote by David Coverdale

There is something deliciously sideways about a rock frontman defending bootleggers on moral grounds, but Coverdale isn’t really praising piracy. He’s shaming the official gatekeepers for abandoning the one job they’ve always claimed as their ethical alibi: taking profits from the hits and reinvesting them in the next wave.

The intent is pragmatic, not utopian. Coverdale draws a line between extraction and circulation. If a bootleg outfit skims ten percent and that money actually finds its way to “new bands,” it becomes, in his telling, a rough-and-ready arts endowment - scrappy, imperfect, but functionally closer to the romantic myth of rock as a self-renewing ecosystem. He’s also positioning himself as fair-minded: “I’m cool with” is the language of a veteran who understands that total control is a fantasy, and who’d rather argue about what the money does than who gets to touch it.

The subtext is a broader indictment of late-stage label culture: consolidation, risk aversion, catalog worship. Record companies used to justify their cut by promising development - A&R as patronage, not just policing. Coverdale implies that modern labels have kept the margins and dropped the mission, behaving less like partners and more like toll collectors.

Context matters: he comes from an era when bands were “built” over multiple albums, when touring, radio, and physical sales formed a machine that labels managed. Bootlegs, then and now, expose what fans will chase regardless of permission. Coverdale’s jab is that even the outlaws remember how reinvestment is supposed to work. The suits, allegedly, don’t.