The CEO billionaire of the music streaming platform Spotify, Daniel Ek, recently stated in an interview that:

“a “narrative fallacy” had been created and caused music fans to believe that Spotify doesn’t pay musicians enough for streams of their music. “Some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape,” Ek said, “where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough.””

Many artists have disagreed in the past to Spotify’s business model. Canadian singer Esthero included a protest message in one of her singles and UK musician and writer Steve Lawson had this to say about the interview with Daniel Ek:

“What’s worth noting is that there is, however, a REALLY interesting conversation to be had about creativity, work rate, product vs process, aesthetics, the affordances of releasing stuff digital-only. It’s just that the billionaire who’s lobbying to pay musicians and songwriters less can fuck off out of it.

There are few people on the planet whose opinion on ‘what musicians should do’ I hold in lower regard than Daniel Ek. Like, Trump-level irrelevance as an opinion holder on anything.

Once again for the people at the back – fuck this guy.”

Some people weighed in on the matter emphasizing how the music industry is quickly turning into a world of quantity over quality:

As we wrote in a previous article here on Shouts it is “well known how badly Spotify and many other streaming services pay the creators for streamed or bought music. That is excluding though, a handful of services like Bandcamp, for example, who don’t charge a penny for streaming but instead make their money from revenue share on sales.”

Somehow though, when journalists make up graphs and images or write about streaming services they seem to always leave Bandcamp out of their ‘research’.

Thom Yorke once stated that Spotify was “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse”. I hope his prediction proves correct.

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