What happened to Tila Tequila?

Is Thien Thanh Thi Nguyen - also known as Tila Tequila - facing (at last!) some bad luck?

One would wonder about it, after hearing some recent news about the model/performer/MySpace superstar.

“Big month for Tila Tequila” says enthusiastically a press release dated July 12, 2007 sent from the United Kingdom to (re)launch a couple of online gaming websites - actually announced last January - who have Tila as a testimonial and are based in Alderney, a nice little tax heaven located in the English Channel and (as “sisters” Jersey and Guernsey) out of the British jurisdiction and also of the severe European Union laws.

That’s not all: Tila is also, simultaneously on the Penthouse cover and on the no.2 spot in the Apple iTunes charts.

It looks like a consecration for the presumed star of MySpace. But the press release, to someone, might look like a lot of smoke in the eyes. What happened to the supposed music career enhancements? Only a year ago, Tila seemed close to a major label release.

Tila's next step, after becoming the so-called MySpace phenomenon, was getting a deal with a major label and release a complete music production: a cd single or, even better, a full album. In 2006, will.i.am of Black Eyed Peas announced that Tila had been signed to his personal label, linked to major label Universal Music Group.

Months passed and this work seems lost. In february 2007 Tila announces that her single is now ready: it is successfully released onto iTunes.
It rapidly sells 13.000 digital copies (in July 2007 this figure became 14.000 according to Wikipedia, but the track failed to break into the official Billboard charts) and since - in a definitely smart way - whoever downloads the track can freely download the music video, Tila enters the Top 100 in the iTunes music charts and hits the no.1 spot in the video chart.

The track, I Love U, put together by hip-hop producer Lil Jon, is available in two versions, a “clean” one and an “explicit” one for a “mature audicence”.

But it doesn’t show any major label copyright info: Tila released it without a label.

Or so she says, since in some sites the name “StratArt” is displayed: is it a company of her own, a consultants agency or the real name of the creator and manager of the Tila charachter?

On her MySpace page, Tila gives a contact e-mail address located on the samanagement.com domain, which is owned by “Strategic Artist Management”, based in Westwood, California. But the copyright info published on some music sites sometimes do not mean very much: a distributor’s name is indicated instead of the label, so it wouldn’t be so strange if the name of a management agency (which probably sent out the music cds) was indicated as copyright owner instead of the name of an unsigned artist.

In mid March a CD EP quietly appeared in the lists of new music releases; a small Washington-based label, The Saturday Team, enthusiastically announced the release: “The Sex EP” - the first real Tila Tequila record - was recorded in Sweden and produced by Daniel “Supergrass” Johansen. Lyrics and melodies are penned by Tila herself, as the label’s website says.

The website briefly mentions a legal controversy to stop the EP release and the subsequent court victory that paved the way for the publication (after some months, though, this information seems to have disappeared from the Saturday Team website). Who are the parties involved in the controversy and why, is the second mystery in our story.

Links to Amazon and the relatively unknown Merchster are provided, but while the latter seems to have the disc, the Amazon link has been apparently removed.
Amazon’s English branch lists the cd but doesn’t show the cover image. Meanwhile, the EP shows up also in some digital distribution services such as Sony Connect and Juno (which has also the physical cd and seems the only site currently displaying the covers in their actual size; the cd exists, and it also comes with a second (bonus) disc, a “sampler” of the label’s other productions: looks like another smart move).

So, it looks like Tila choosed to remain an independent.

But did she really choose? Or did this happen after being dropped by a major? Or by the major(s): apparently, there was also a second offer for her, apart from the one from the Universal subsidiary (Tila herself in more than one occasion mentioned she turned down two record contracts)…

Or maybe, did Miss Nguyen - tired to wait for the slow times required by a large structure - think to do something else, and did this cost her her previous contract?

These could be a couple of possible scenarios.

Only, MusicBlob came to possess a copy of an unpublished - and curious to say the least - legal document.

It is a complaint filed in California by The Saturday Team and Icon Music Entertainment Services against Tila and Does (the word “Does” is just the plural for “John Doe”, the classic name given to an unknown party in a legal case).

Contents of the lawsuit? According to the document, Tila had signed a contract with The Saturday Team in 2005 to record the disc and authorize its release. Later, The Saturday Team closed a distribution deal with Icon. Tila at this point “revealed” (?) to her fans (presumably in a MySpace bulletin which we weren’t able to trace) that the cd is a “fake”.

The Saturday Team guys get angry and think that Tila breached a contract.

A copy of the above-mentioned document can be found in the MusicBlob Documents Archive.

What can we say: neither The Saturday Team nor Tila seem available for more details on this story. Did Tila - at least intially - get involved in the creation of a “fake” to be sold thanks to her Internet popularity and her extra-artistic qualities, or was she the victim of someone willing to unfairly exploit her fame, or did she breach in a definitely not very professional way a deal with some honest record producers?

A CV like this might not presuade other professionals in the industry to work with her.

The absence of the EP from sites and services such as Amazon and Apple iTunes is easily explained: as the The Saturday Team lawyers say, Tila herself would have contacted the sites to persuade them not to sell the disc. Some shops and services (apart from Juno, Merchster and Amazon UK also Rhapsody and Best Buy, for example) still have the tracks or the cd.

An element that would seem favourable to The Saturday Team is a video clip posted onto YouTube: in it Tila is shown during the production of The Sex EP and fragments of the track “Little Brat” can be heard.

Somebody could say that these days digital editing allows to show pretty much everything in a video clip. But that seems really Tila and she doesn’t seem uncomfortable with the production of some of the material that will later end up onto the disputed EP. She even asserts to be the author of the lyrics.

In the archives of ASCAP Tila’s full name and her CAE/IPI, a number used internationally to identify an author/composer, are listed. So Tila seems now covered from this point of view. But we weren’t able to locate any info neither on the tracks included in the “Sex EP” nor on other works she composed. But this doesn’t mean much: tracks registered several years ago or and regularly protected may be absent from similar online archives.

However, this might be the beginning of a definitely more complicated phase for Tila Tequila and her (rigorously half-naked) persona, at least for the musical section of her “career”: this time, not even her MySpace friends will be enough to get by; even being almost two millions, as someone pointed out, they weren’t so helpful in contributing huge sales onto iTunes. This could be the beginning of a descending parable for Tila, in the exact moment in which MySpace itself - with whom her career has practically identified until now starts suffering for the presence of a competitor such as Facebook.