Here’s a question for Geoff Barrow as he rails against streaming services for not paying him (34 million streams = $2500? Better get a new contract). In the 25 years you’ve been in the business, Geoff, how much has radio paid you?
I appreciate, to a lesser or greater degree, Geoff’s frustration, I just don’t know who to blame. I don’t know anybody except for the scientists who invented the technology left to blame. The truth is, whether it is Spotify, Youtube, Pandora or Itunes, information wants to be free and it will be free. There is nothing you can do about it except find some way to make as much money as you can from it.
Say Geoff pulls Portishead off Spotify. Then what? Will he start making money on sales? How? The truth is the only way for Geoff to get rich is to tour… how else can he do it? Coachella, Governor’s Ball,Glastonbury. Portishead are popular enough, they can do it if they want to. But record sales? There is no there there any more, there hasn’t been seen Napster.
It is like railing against god because an earthquake took your hour house. To what end? How is one reflected in the other. hat will happen? Will music disappear with Spotify, or become profitable without out it? How can recordings be made viable again. The answer is simple: they can’t.
Incidentally, Spotify still isn’t profitable. Spotify could die and what would be left? Would streaming stop? Daniel Ek had his window of opportunity, but he just can’t close the deal and as for pop music, nobody in their right minds claims music is as important in the 1970s as it was in the 1970s… it just isn’t so.
Music isn’t bad in 2015, some of it is great, most of it is inconsistently good, there are a lot of choices. But it isn’t IMPORTANT. Nobody is having their lives changed. Blaming music distribution for the state of music is asinine, if you don’t wanna make music because you’re not getting real paid, don’t make music. If you are a teenager and in a band and you don’t want to change the world, why are you in a band? If you don’t want to be the Clash, what do you want to be?