Go ahead. Download some free Janis Ian tunes. She wants you to.

One of the most influential folk musicians of all time, Ian has been recording since the '60s and released her 20th album, Folk Is the New Black, earlier this year. She wrote her first song at age 12 and recorded her first album, Society's Child, when she was just 14. The title song, which addresses interracial romance, was so controversial at the time that some disc jockeys who played it were fired and one radio station that that gave it air time was burnt down.

In addition to death threats, Ian has survived a roller coaster lifestyle that included once doing lines of coke with Jimi Hendrix, but says she got most of her big mistakes over by age 21. In the early '70s, she played a triple-header with Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen; the club owner didn't think any one of them could fill the house but figured lining up all three would give the show half a chance.

Now Ian has nine Grammy awards to her name, as well as a notoriously pro-free-downloading stance. “To me, its promotion,” she says, “and I frankly think the record companies are stupid for not having looked at it that way in the first place.” Her article on the subject, “The Internet Debacle,” has been adopted as a manifesto in the fight to defend downloading music and has further served to broaden her fan base. It's available on her website, which gets a quarter million visitors per year even though Ian hasn't had a top twenty record in the U.S. in three decades.

In her live shows, Ian advocates downloading music, arguing that offering free samples only increases sales. “I had an email yesterday from somebody who had just found a really old song of mine on Napster,” she says, “and because of that had come to my site, and wound up buying about a hundred bucks' worth of CDs.” But she knows that she can expect slow change at best from the record industry: “Well, they're a corporation. And corporations are like big elephants: They're not quick to move. Turning around is hard for them.”

Ian longs for the day when the record companies offer up their entire back catalog, including music that's been out of print, at a reasonable price. Her own back catalog is still in print, nearly 40 years after her first release (that album, Society's Child, recently went out of print but will be included in a new compilation).

Not only is Ian's back catalog still in print, but she actually owns it. How has she managed to retain such control in a notoriously despotic industry? She had a good attorney back in the '70s, for one thing. And after a long hiatus, Ian came back in the '90s with the wherewithal and the means to assume ownership of her intellectual product rather than relinquishing it to a record company.

Now she's “living off the grid,” something she says an increasing number of recording artists are doing. In her case it works like this: Instead of selling her albums to a record company, she raises the money to produce them through deals with affiliates in several countries. She then leases the product to these affiliates, typically for a period of five years, and gives them the chance to see returns on their investment through her live shows. In order to afford this privilege she had to take out a second mortgage to fund her first record.

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