The problem is not that she desperately wants money from the release. She may or may not need the money, but she actually doesn't want it. She recommends fans download it free. She doesn't even complain that out of her 330,000 twitter fans only 11,000 actually bothered to buy art angels (which does support her obviously) in its highest sales week. that's pitiful, but again, she didn't complain- she even thanked us for supporting her! as if THAT was support! she was trying (up till then) to be a new kind of pop star, remember? we as a fanbase, maybe just by being too poor, killed that for her. but she was okay with that cause it was never about money. And then she realized she still liked being "alternative." (of course Radiohead and NIN were alternative and always sold way more, the national is alternative/indie and is even on her same indie label and they debuted at #1... being alternative doesn't mean she doesn't want to be known or widely heard, so we still need to be buying her stuff to help her fulfill that dream of being the NIN of today).
Anyway... she doesn't want money, she just, reasonably, wants her haters and enemies not to be making money off her work. If anyone makes money off it, the creator needs to have some sort of cut. Otherwise, nobody should be making money off it. If Arbutus was giving away free vinyls, or vinyls so cheap that they only broke even after manufacturing costs, I would be all for that, and probably she would too. but unfortunately that's not what they are doing. they are, in fact, using her work as a cash cow for their label, giving her none of the profits. and that's what's disgusting about it.
There is huge confusion over the payment issue. Many people seem to feel that this is normal, for labels to take 100% of profits. This is not at all normal, even if you are talking about African Americans on white owned labels in the '50s, this is a highly unusual situation. Nobody knowingly signs contracts this bad. Artists only find themselves screwed over this way when labels lie to them.
The reason Arbutus was able to get away with this is not that Grimes is stupid, it's that she was idealistic. The reason they can do such a fraud is specific to Arbutus's status (in the past) as a collective, rather than a standard business. And collective is not a dirty word. it's also because I believe in the possibility of indie music and collectives that reject profit motive, that I call bullshit on the way this beautiful ideal has been insulted and demeaned by Arbutus and Cowan, who seems to be the Stalin of the indie-label-collective thing, in contrast to the true Montreal Marx of Constellation. Arbutus would not have been able to fuck Grimes over this way, except that they were operating on collective trust, as a family, not a business. And clearly, at some point Cowan decided to "sell out", and he used that trust he'd built up, without written contracts, as a way to then create profits in the traditional big business way, by exploiting his hardest workers (Grimes), and he was able to do so even better than a traditional business, because of that initial lie that he had been the protective collective godfather they could trust. Disgusting. And even if some may want to say Grimes was an Akhmatova-like dissident, she did not deserve to be violently purged. Maybe Grimes did eventually realize the collective idea was not for her- but she had already helped that collective far more by being part of it for a time, than she could hurt it by leaving. And I'm sure she had VERY good reasons (not just money) for leaving that mafia family. So the revenge that seems to have been visited on her, just taking 100% from her catalog, is completely unjustifed. They could've worked out something even if their ideology and hers were no longer a good match.