Radiohead's Thom Yorke Pulls Albums From Spotify In Protest of Low Royalties

First time accepted submitter rpopescu writes "Thom Yorke of Radiohead fame has pulled his solo album 'Eraser' (as well as music made as Atoms for Peace) from the music streaming service Spotify, as a protest at how much it pays the artists. Quote: '"Make no mistake. These are all the same old industry bods trying to get a stranglehold on the delivery system."'"

Comments

Reward the artist

[Hatta]

Reward the artist by going to see a show and buying some merch. Nothing else really gets back to them in any significant amounts.

Re:Reward the artist

[Anonymous Coward]

There is more there then just money, the recording industry wants to keeps it monopoly on music. They are branching out into other countries to rob those artists of there copyrights. If you sign a deal you lose the right to control your own music, companies can re-release songs, or do whatever they want with the music. Obviously this has been talked about already, but they do not want artists to create and actually own there own music, they continue to go after artists with the DMCA take down. Where is the EFF is fighting all of this??

The merch, profits I believe still go to record companies, but your right, money artists make from concerts is there source of revenue. Some bands are not very ggod and because they had a couple of hits (at least in the states) they act as if they reinvented music and are god.

Re:Reward the artist

[Anonymous Coward]

Musicians? That's a hobby, not a profession. If they want to get paid, let them sell t-shirts. Heh heh you'd never catch me dead wearing one of those, but maybe some get-a-lifers would. BTW I downloaded some of their songs and most of them suck. They should THANK ME and PAY ME for listening to that crap they call music. If they recorded something worthwhile I might buy a CD, in fact I did that once seven years ago.

- typical Slashdot post

Re:Reward the artist

[darkitecture]

Reward the artist by going to see a show and buying some merch. Nothing else really gets back to them in any significant amounts.

Although I agree with you wholeheartedly and try to support my favorite artists as much as I can, this is nowhere near as practical for most of the world as one might first think.

One of my closest friends is a mad Dave Matthews Band fan and has been fortunate enough to attend at least four DMB gigs over the past twelve months. I'm sure Dave Matthews and my friend are both pleased as punch about this setup. My favorite artists include amongst others David Bowie and Tom Waits. I live in Japan. Go on and have a guess how many gigs either of them have put on in Japan in the past 12 months.

Now guess how many gigs either of them have put on here in Japan in the past 12 years.

Hint: you could have a nasty accident with a bandsaw and still count them on one hand. Now I'm not faulting the artists or their manager or anybody. That's life unfortunately. Even if my tastes were more mainstream, I still wouldn't come close to being able to see as many concerts as most Americans. I don't see Rihanna or Jay Z or Radiohead hosting many concerts here either. Radiohead hasn't toured here since 1994!

I've seen many of my favorite artists both here and overseas and almost without exception I've gone out of my way to get great (read: expensive) seats because I see great value for money in spending hundreds of dollars in seeing my favorite artists perform live. It's unfortunate for both me and the artists I would be willing to support that I don't live in the continental US or mainland Europe where most concerts seem to be held.

Re:Reward the artist

[PopeRatzo]

The problem is that the internet has shifted more power to the consumers and away from the producers

Problem? In our economic system, fewer and fewer transactions exist where the balance of power favors the consumer. The world has been on a "supply-side" fantasy for thirty years, and it has not gone well for most people.

But artists have complete control over the pricing and over which distribution channels they choose to use. Once the last nails are in the coffin of the entertainment/industrial complex, you'll see that happen, and it will be better for all artists except the ones without talent at the top of the food chain.

Thom Yorke has benefited greatly from the mainstream music industry. Now that he's on the downward slope of his career, he decides that he doesn't like how things are done any more. That's fine. I buy a lot of music that I've first heard on Spotify. If Thom doesn't want to be part of that any more, it's his choice.

Re:Reward the artist

[Charliemopps]

Where is the EFF is fighting all of this??

They are busy protecting our civil liberties and trying to prevent our country from turning into a police state. Some millionaires making tens of millions instead of hundreds of millions of dollars because of the greed of their corporate owners may not be "just" but I'm betting it's not a real high priority for the EFF.

Re:Reward the artist

[jedidiah]

People only have so much money to spend and they are going to spend even less on that on extreme luxury items like entertainment. The fact that people don't have an infinite amount of money to spend on pop music is totally a 1st world problem.

The real problem here is that you've got artists that aren't too bright about anything that isn't music having their heads filled with nonsense by media executives. They start drinking their own kool-aid after awhile.

It's far more likely that the explosion of digital media of all kinds has devalued ALL forms of entertainment. If you think you can get a bigger payday from someone else then you're probably just kidding yourself.

You have to compete against EVERYTHING that can distract your customer. This includes freebie tablet games and LOLCats.

It's not 1950 any more.

Re:Reward the artist

[asliarun]

Where is the EFF is fighting all of this??

They are busy protecting our civil liberties and trying to prevent our country from turning into a police state. Some millionaires making tens of millions instead of hundreds of millions of dollars because of the greed of their corporate owners may not be "just" but I'm betting it's not a real high priority for the EFF.

And there's a huge problem with precisely this type of thinking. Bands like Radiohead are trying extremely hard to "do the right thing" - i.e. what they consider fair to themselves and to their audience. We, the listeners, should be trying to prop them up instead of calling sour grapes on them because they happen to be millionaires or whatever. If you like Joe No-Name band that has sold all of 50 albums so far, good for you.

Do remember though that your (and my) media consumption largely consists of authors, bands, movie directors, and artists that have attained some level of commercial success. It is really sad to see initiatives like Radiohead's honor based payment scheme - not be wildly successful. I would actually have loved to see Radiohead make 10 times the money from this experiment than they would have from the record label. Just imagine the message that would have sent - not just to Radiohead but to every other artist and even to us.

Honestly, if Radiohead makes a hundred mil instead of ten mil, I wish him all the very best. Thom Yorke's talent, consistency, and hard work deserves all the money he can get. The concept of money is completely nonsensical when it comes to creative works anyway. Heck, even manufactured products nowadays cost what they cost because of factors that have little to do with their manufacturing cost.

But at the very least, if someone is doing good work in a creative field, they should at least have some level of trust in the fact that they can circumvent the established system with its attendant bloodsucking leeches, and still feel like they are getting the same level of respect, exposure, and money. In fact, it should be a lot more.

Re:Pay the artists?

[Anonymous Coward]

The lazy fucks can tour if they want to earn some dosh from their music.

Pfft. Getting paid for life for 2 weeks' work. How quaint. Move into the 21st century!

Re:Massive sense of entitlement & missing pers

[squiggleslash]

If they're running at a loss, then the artists are definitely getting paid too much.

Or listeners are paying too little. Or the CEO of ${MUSIC_STREAMING_SERVICE} is overpaid.

And no, if my paycheck for the last couple of weeks work were to be spread out over the remainder of my employer's lifetime as a few dollars a month, I wouldn't consider it a "good deal". People have to eat now.

The Music Industry must Die!

[MrKaos]

They have fucked over Artists and the IT Industry. Copyright laws that are unequitable, extensible, DRM. WTF makes the Music Companies such a protected species in business anyway? Wasn't capitalism designed to cull business models that were no longer viable?

Seems to me that the existing music business establishment is trying to devise an internet business models that will fuck over music creative types until the end of time.

Spotify's retort

[fatgraham]

http://www.musicweek.com/news/read/spotify-responds-to-thom-yorke-and-nigel-godrich-criticism/055383

Doesn't seem so bad. I think Thom Yorke is missing a step... spotify pays the LABELS. The LABELS obviously decided the royalties from spotify are enough... Perhaps the labels aren't paying artists enough...

Re:Massive sense of entitlement & missing pers

[Rich0]

Nearly 90% of the artists who get a cheque for digital play receive less than $5,000 a year

Technically I think that's pretty good, isn't it? Write some songs, receive residual income whilst you do nothing else for the rest of the delivery platforms life. Win win.

I think there are two issues with this kind of logic.

The first is counter to your argument - the residual income is essentially a big part of the total compensation. When I get paid at work to do a job, I get paid the full value of the job. I don't really have an expectation of residual income. Now imagine that I'm a software developer and I get paid a share of productivity savings over time - I get paid $10k up-front for six months of work, but then I get 30% of any efficiencies the company that bought the software realizes as a result of using my software. Then the company uses accounting games to undermeasure the savings. In a situation like this the residual income was promised as the major component of the total compensation.

On the other hand, I think that a statement that 90% of artists make less than $5000/yr is very misleading because of the way the payments tend to be distributed. With digital distribution there really is no barrier to getting your item listed. That means that I can probably play a few bars on a kazoo and put it up for sale, and maybe sell a few copies to relatives if I'm lucky. When the same service sells that alongside of a top-10 hit I don't think you can really talk about averages in any kind of meaningful way.

Re:Massive sense of entitlement & missing pers

[Endo13]

When you're trying to force your way as a supplier into an industry where supply already vastly exceeds demand, you should expect that to happen.

As a poster above indicated, if you could wipe all contemporary professional musicians and their music off the face of the earth, we'd still have more new music tomorrow. People make music because they love to make music, and that will always be the case. You actually don't have to have paid professionals to supply it. Much of the stuff produced by the paid professionals isn't even that good, and gets surpassed in quality by no-name indie bands a thousand times every week.

RH gets NOTHING for radio play

[Overzeetop]

According to the WSJ:

"In the United States...radio companies pay only songwriters and music publishers, not record companies. The system, dating back almost a century, is based on the idea that radio play has enough promotional value for performers that they do not also need to be paid royalties."

Yes, that's right - the actual performance of the song gets them NOTHING, NADA, ZILCH, not one thin dime. So if Clear Channel plays a Radiohead song on 200 radio stations 100 times in a month reaching (on average) 40,000 listeners per station, that's 800 Million listener-plays for absolutely $zero.

Remind me again why RadioHead is getting such a raw deal at $1000/4M plays, but $0 is just fine?

Re:Lame Copout

[jedidiah]

> I'm so tired of reading "I help myself to all their stuff but I'll buy their merch". Quit being a freeloader.

"Stop listening to the radio you thieving scum!"

Re:Pay the artists?

[vakuona]

That's like saying Usain Bolt gets paid for running for 10 seconds!

Re:This is what you get when you mess with us

[denmarkw00t]

Sure, but in the case of the two mentioned, the members of Radiohead and Trent Reznor are all pretty adept at studio work, so there's a lot less spent hiring sound guys, producers, etc, when you can do it yourself. If you've got the money (which they do), then time/labor isn't really an issue either since you can rely on saved cash to get by while you do it your way. Not saying this will always be the case, but generally, if you can do it yourself at a fraction of the cost you would face going through an agency, you'd probably walk off in the black no problem (assuming too that your music is good and you can find a fanbase).