Spotify has repeatedly been criticised for underpaying artists, while keeping around 30 per cent of its revenue from music streaming. The campaigns against Spotify by Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke and Taylor Swift, which resulted in the two superstars boycotting Spotify for years, attracted massive media attention. This blog post aims to shed light on the background to this conflict and answers the question of what the boycott ultimately achieved.
The Music Streaming Economy – Part 11: Thom Yorke and Taylor Swift vs Spotify
Thom Yorke, frontman of the British rock band Radiohead, summed up the issue of Spotify’s payouts to music creators as follows: “Make no mistake, new artists you discover on Spotify will not get paid. Meanwhile shareholders will shortly be rolling in it. Simples.”[1] Although Spotify only went public five years later, Yorke was ultimately proved right. It was not the artists who benefited from the IPO, but the music majors who had secured shares in the company. As a sign of protest, Thom York pulled all the material from his solo career and the band project “Atoms for Peace” from Spotify. And in a series of posts on Twitter in mid-July 2013, he and his producer, Nigel Godrich, followed suit: “[N]ew artists get paid fuck all with this model”.[2] By “this model”, Godrich was referring to the business model of music streaming, which he believes generates less revenue than radio airplay royalties. To the objection in a comment that “Pink Floyd” and “The Eagles” had also made their albums available on Spotify, Godrich responded: “It’s money for old rope … But making new recorded music needs funding. Some records can be made in a laptop, but some need musician and skilled technicians. These things cost money. Pink floyds catalogue has already generated billions of dollars for someone (not necessarily the band) so now putting it on a streaming site makes total sense. But if people had been listening to spotify instead of buying records in 1973 … I doubt very much if dark side would have been made. It would just be too expensive.”[3]
In his inimitable style, Thom Yorke followed this up with an interview for the Mexican website Sopitas, in which he described Spotify as “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse”.[4] The critic was directed less at the Swedish music streaming service, which Yorke saw as a symptom of an undesirable development, than at the “old” music industry: “I feel like as musicians we need to fight the Spotify thing. I feel that in some ways what’s happening in the mainstream is the last gasp of the old industry.” And it is dominated by the music majors, whose business model Yorke directly attacks: “But because they’re using old music, because they’re using the majors … the majors are all over it because they see a way of re-selling all their old stuff for free, make a fortune, and not die.” Spotify is blamed by Yorke as the handmaiden of the music majors for making it very difficult for new music and young musicians to establish themselves on the market, and Yorke worries about the way music is consumed in the streaming age: “But it’s all about how we change the way we listen to music, it’s all about what happens next in terms of technology, in terms of how people talk to each other about music, and a lot of it could be really fucking bad.”[5]
Also other superstars in the music business were critical or even hostile towards Spotify and music streaming. The recordings of the Australian heavy metal cult band AC/DC were not made available on music streaming platforms until the end of June 2015,[6] and the Beatles ended their streaming boycott on Christmas Day 2015 by announcing on Twitter that their entire music catalogue would be available to stream on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Prime Music, Tidal, Deezer and four other providers from 0.01 am on 24 December.[7]
However, it was US superstar Taylor Swift who caused the biggest stir when she announced on 3 November 2014 that she would not be making her recently released album ‘1989’ available on Spotify, pulling her entire back catalogue from the service. In an interview with Time magazine, she explained that her music was being devalued by the Swedish streaming service’s ad-supported free model and that it was contributing massively to the decline in recorded music sales: “I think there should be an inherent value placed on art. I didn’t see that happening, perception-wise, when I put my music on Spotify. Everybody’s complaining about how music sales are shrinking, but nobody’s changing the way they’re doing things. They keep running towards streaming, which is, for the most part, what has been shrinking the numbers of paid album sales.” She pointed out in the interview that her music would still be available on Apple/iTunes because of its premium tier.[8]
Scott Borchetta, whose Big Machine label released Swift’s albums, made a similar point. In a radio interview on “Sixx Sense With Nikki Sixx”, he criticised the free availability of Taylor Swift’s music on Spotify as disrespectful, pointing out that her songs could still be streamed on paid platforms: “We determined that her fan base is so in on her, let’s pull everything off of Spotify, and any other service that doesn’t offer a premium service. Now if you are a premium subscriber to Beats or Rdio or any of the other services that don’t offer just a free-only, then you will find her catalogue.”[9] In an interview with Time Magazine, he calculated that his label, Big Machine, had received just US $496,044 for Taylor Swift’s recordings in the US home market over the past twelve months. That would be less than the revenue for music video streams on the ad-funded platform Vevo, which is hosted by YouTube.[10] The contradiction is striking. Taylor Swift’s music was removed from both Spotify’s free and paid services, but remained available for free on YouTube via Vevo. Spotify had to react, and even its founder and CEO, Daniel Ek, spoke out on the Spotify blog pointing out that a superstar of Taylor Swift’s calibre could earn US $6 million a year worldwide on Spotify.[11] The Swedish company also commented on Scott Borchetta’s statements to Time Magazine, calculating that in the twelve months prior to the boycott, US $2 million had been paid to Taylor Swift’s label for all streams worldwide, including US $500,000 in label and publishing royalties in October 2014 alone.[12]
Even if the difference between Borchetta’s and Spotify’s figures can be attributed to US versus international figures, the suspicion remains that the Spotify boycott was primarily a major PR campaign by Swift and her label. It was a way to draw attention to the CD release of 1989, which sold 1.7 million copies in its first two weeks in the US alone.[13] At the beginning of November 2014, there were also rumours that Scott Borchetta wanted to sell his label group for US $200 million.[14] He may also have started the Spotify controversy to distract from the rumours, which would certainly have caused problems with his top star, Taylor Swift, who was contracted to record a sixth album for ‘Big Machine’. Five years later, when Borchetta did indeed sell, the same dispute broke out over the master rights to Swift’s recordings.
Anyway, both Thom Yorke and Taylor Swift have made their peace with Spotify and their music can be streamed there. Taylor Swift gave up her resistance to Spotify two and a half years after the boycott was declared in June 2017, when her five studio albums could be streamed on the platform again, four of which immediately entered the Billboard 200 albums chart and generated US $500,000 in streaming revenue.[15] The singer and her management team had to realise that the promotional power of Spotify cannot be ignored, and that the streaming service is a key factor in a star’s commercial success. In December 2017, Thom Yorke had his two singles as a solo artist, ‘The Eraser’ (2006) and ‘Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes’, as well as the album ‘AMOK’ by his band project ‘Atoms for Peace’, placed on Spotify, but without commenting on Twitter, he referred to critical Twitter posts by Geoff Barrow of the band Portishead, in which he complained about the low payouts from music streaming.[16] But even Thom Yorke had to accept Spotify’s market power.
Endnotes
[1] The Twitter posts have since disappeared from Thom York’s account and can only be reconstructed indirectly through quotes cited in the media., e.g. in The Guardian, “Thom Yorke blasts Spotify on Twitter as he pulls his music”, July 15, 2013, accessed: 2024-08-27.
[2] Nigel Godrich’s Twitter post can be read on Business Insider, “Radiohead Singer Thom Yorke Pulls His Music From Spotify, And Blasts It On Twitter”, July 15, 2013, accessed: 2024-08-27 and on his Twitter/X account (@nigelgod).
[3] Ibid.
[4] Cited in The Guardian, “Thom Yorke calls Spotify ‘the last desperate fart of a dying corpse'”, October 7, 2013, accessed: 2024-08-27.
[5] Ibid.
[6] The Guardian, “AC/DC becomes latest act to get on the streaming bandwagon”, June 30, 2015, accessed: 2024-08-27.
[7] Twitter, “The Beatles Now Streaming”, December 23, 2015, accessed: 2024-08-27.
[8] Time Magazine, “Taylor Swift on 1989, Spotify, Her Next Tour and Female Role Models”, November 13, 2014, accessed: 2024-08-27.
[9] Cited in Billboard, “Big Machine’s Scott Borchetta Explains Why Taylor Swift Was Removed From Spotify”, November 8, 2014, accessed: 2024-08-27.
[10] Time Magazine, “Taylor Swift’s Spotify Paycheck Mystery”, November 12, 2014, accessed: 2024-08-27.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Billboard, “Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’ Spends Second Week at No. 1 on Billboard 200 Chart”, November 12, 2014, accessed: 2024-08-27.
[14] New York Post, “Taylor Swift’s label on the block for over $200M”, November 1, 2014, accessed: 2024-08-27.
[15] Forbes, “Why Did Taylor Swift Really Rejoin Spotify?”, June 27, 2017, accessed: 2024-08-27.
[16] MNE, “Radiohead’s Thom Yorke still isn’t a fan of Spotify”, December 29, 2017, accessed: 2024-08-27.
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