Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has struck back at Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke in their continuing streaming music debate.
Yorke and Nigel Godrich pulled their Atoms For Peace album, 'Amok' (and Yorke's solo album, 'The Eraser') from the Spotify service last July. (Radiohead's music is still available.)
At the time, Godrich said the protest was because "new artists get paid fuck all with this model". Yorke added: "Make no mistake new artists you discover on #Spotify will not get paid. meanwhile shareholders will shortly being rolling in it. Simples."
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Ek has taken a swipe back at Yorke. "This is the single biggest shift since the inception of recorded music," Ek says, "so it is naturally going to draw criticism and speculation. [Yorke] looks at this and says over a million streams gives me a few thousand dollars, and he says if I had a million downloads [which pay higher royalty rates], that would mean $1 million — so Spotify is not good. But the difference is, he would not have had a million downloads because they are not comparable. In fact, with 24 million users — and Apple has 500 million users — we already have billions of streams today."
Ek also had some choice words for Beats Music, the budding Spotify competitor that's secured the endorsement of celebs like Dr Dre, Jimmy Iovine and Trent Reznor. "It's a competitor, for sure," Ek acknowledged, "but my way of looking at it is, if it gets people to understand the value of streaming, it is ultimately good. Our way of doing this is not just slapping some celebrity brand on it and hoping it will be good. We are a social service; we are a product company. People have tried to put a brand on it and thought that's enough, and they have failed: Microsoft, Nokia -- many big companies."
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)
