Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters Slams The Thieves Of Silicon Valley

Roger Waters

Another day, another musician who gives his opinion about the digital age and the state of the music industry, and this time it is Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters who talked to The Times and slammed the Silicon Valley’s ‘gallery of rogues and thieves’:

‘I feel enormously privileged to have been born in 1943 and not 1983,’ said Waters. ‘To have been around when there was a music business and the takeover by Silicon Valley hadn’t happened, and in consequence, you could still make a living writing and recording songs and playing them to people.’

‘When this gallery of rogues and thieves had not yet injected themselves between the people who aspire to be creative and their potential audience and steal every fucking cent anybody ever made,’ he added.

First of all, Waters is really not up to date, I guess he is mostly speaking about streaming services and the biggest name of all, Spotify, is Swedish (just like the biggest pirating site, The Pirate Bay), so it’s not really Silicon valley country. But I know what he means, the internet allowed all this. Then, haven’t we established that the biggest thieves are in fact the labels, which get the biggest part of the pie, and in this case, nothing has really changed?

And if you are streaming music or downloading for free, Waters want you to be ashamed of yourselves:

‘I blame the punters as well to some extent, a whole generation that’s grown up who believe that music should be free. I mean why not make everything free? Then you could walk into a shop and say ‘I like that television’ and you walk out with it. No! Somebody made that and you have to buy it! ‘Oh, I”ll just pick up few apples.’ No! Some farmer grew those and brought them here to be sold!”

How many times have we been discussing this? And at the end it seems there is always this dichotomy between the old and the young generation, Roger Waters is just showing his age! Look at the attitude of Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker who spoke on Reddit last week. He is young and 100% for free music: ‘I feel like music will be free sooner or later, and I think I’m all for it. There’s all this talk of music needing a monetary value, this ownership of music, even that it needs a physical form. But intrinsically… it’s MUSIC, it should be better than that…’

Whatever will happen in the future, nothing can de-evolve back into the system we had 20 years ago, or even 5 years ago, so all this complaining by old guys won’t do anything.