Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich Are Removing Their Music from Spotify

This is only for Thom Yorke solo tunes, Atoms for Peace music from Thom and Nigel, and Nigel's side project Ultraista. The two make the argument that new music is hurt in the Spotify revenue equation.

With the large stake of Spotify that is owned by the Majors and other large corporate entities such as Coca-Cola, it would be interesting if the 'independent labels' were to come out with some sort of streaming service of their own, whether it be on a label by label basis or on a combined level.

Anyways, let's see what happens with this in the news cycle.

Edit: Found an interesting Thom Yorke quote on his feelings about digital content:

Radiohead have often riffed on the edge of that thoroughly modern disjunction. From their landmark album OK Computer on, the band seemed like evangelists for the revolutionary possibilities of a digital world, self-releasing 2007's In Rainbows on a pay-what-you-want download. Yorke is a bit more sceptical about all that now.

In the days before we meet, he has been watching a box set of Adam Curtis's BBC series, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, about the implications of our digitised future, so the arguments are fresh in his head. "We were so into the net around the time of Kid A," he says. "Really thought it might be an amazing way of connecting and communicating. And then very quickly we started having meetings where people started talking about what we did as 'content'. They would show us letters from big media companies offering us millions in some mobile phone deal or whatever it was, and they would say all they need is some content. I was like, what is this 'content' which you describe? Just a filling of time and space with stuff, emotion, so you can sell it?"

Having thought they were subverting the corporate music industry with In Rainbows, he now fears they were inadvertently playing into the hands of Apple and Google and the rest. "They have to keep commodifying things to keep the share price up, but in doing so they have made all content, including music and newspapers, worthless, in order to make their billions. And this is what we want? I still think it will be undermined in some way. It doesn't make sense to me. Anyway, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. The commodification of human relationships through social networks. Amazing!"[1]

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/feb/23/thom-yorke-radio...

I wonder if artists who withdraw their music from services like this because they don't make "enough money" from them, realize they are getting paid again and again for me listening to albums I've already bought.

You may not be getting paid in buckets and buckets of cash, but what you're getting is really just a freebie. You cannot complain about getting free money.

If enough artists do this, services like Spotify will not offer me enough convenience, and the other option (simply mirroring my 100GB music collection to my work PC) will then be good enough that no artists stands to earn free money for albums I've already paid for.

As far as Thom Yorke's argument goes: That artists are severely underpaid in the streaming-world, I'm not going to debate that or even oppose that. He probably knows better than me.

But we've already established that this was a problem with the album-model as well. You have record companies taking $10 per album and the artist getting paid $1. With a $100,000 "credit" for studio-engineers to repay.

It seems the only truth and rule in the music-industry is that the artist always gets screwed.

$10/month for infinite access to all music ever created just isn't reasonable. And the ad revenue from a majority free user base for infinite access to all music ever created is definitely unreasonable.

It's hard to argue with th connivence factor. However right now Spotify is destroying an existing model, not paying artists, and losing money hand over fist. It's lose/lose/lose. I'd rather consumers just pirate the music that way they at least know they aren't supporting the artists.

A little off topic; in the late 70s a popular Christian singer named Keith Green inked a deal with his label that allowed him to give his records away for whatever people could afford - - even free. So while what they did was recognized as groundbreaking, it was only new for the internet age.

I had no idea that individual artists had any say in this (thought that the mega labels determined the fate of everything related to their signed artists).

Or are Yorke and Godrich's solo arrangements with the labels nonstandard, which makes this possible?