Is Thom Yorke wrong? How can Thom Yorke be wrong? I am talking about his beef with Spotify. I get so confused with Spotify, shouldn’t musicians all agree on it? But apparently they don’t, really don’t. Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart just declared his love for the streaming service to the Guardian:
‘Thom York made a mistake there, him and Nigel Godrich. They were misinformed. I think they just suddenly got a bee in their bonnet, because Spotify is one of the few companies that is transparent and actually pays properly – as a songwriter you should worship Spotify, because they’ve come along with a solution.’
Worship Spotify? Wow that’s very different of what he said in 2012, complaining to Stuff, a consumer technology and gadget magazine, about the fact that he would earn only $47 if his album was streamed non stop for 3 years! So what made him do a 360º turn? For Dave, it’s just a question of numbers:
‘It’s a volume business. If they had 100 million subscribers, which is possible, the payment [for the Eurythmics catalogue] would be equal to the band’s income back at the peak of selling’.
I can’t verify his maths, I am missing too much data but the current problem is that Spotify has only 6 million subscribers worldwide, not 100.
Plus Stewart has another thing to blame: the labels: ‘You see record labels are the devil. Record labels and publishing companies are the worst banks in the world … My own record label boss [Jose Menendez] was murdered by his own kids, and through that murder me and Annie [Lennox] found out where most of our royalties went.’
‘There was a very famous trial [following the murder] called the Menendez trial. He came from Hertz rent-a-car to run RCA Records in the US [the label was owned by Hertz at the time]. How weird is that? And that’s who I had a meeting with for our third album. He was this huge Columbian guy. He shook my hand, saying: ‘Love the album – it’s just like Ghostbusters.’ Ghostbusters?’
I understand what he means, but this is a whole different problem, labels may be evil, dysfunctional or totally uninformed, but Spotify is no better for artists. As a matter of fact he continued by saying his income from music has gone down by 92% in the past decade! And isn’t Spotify partly responsible of this? I really don’t get his reasoning. Just suppose his calculation was correct, how could Spotify possibly grow this much during his lifetime, it’s totally unrealistic.