Spotify's Daniel Ek tackles criticism by Thom Yorke, claims Beats Music isn't a competitor

Spotify founder Daniel Ek tackles recent criticism by Thom Yorke in a new interview.

The Radiohead frontman – as well as the group’s producer Nigel Godrich – has been a vocal critic of Spotify for some time. Most memorably, he referred to Spotify as “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse.”

“We don’t need you to do it”, Yorke claimed in October. “No artists needs you to do it. We can build the shit ourselves, so fuck off. 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. That’s why to me, Spotify the whole thing, is such a massive battle, because it’s about the future of all music. It’s about whether we believe there’s a future in music, same with the film industry, same with books. To me this isn’t the mainstream, this is is like the last fart, the last desperate fart of a dying corpse. What happens next is the important part.”

Yorke later expanded on this, tweeting “The corpse is the old music industry and old music. We are concerned with how artists survive creating new music in the future .. That is what matters. That is our problem with Spotify… There are bigger scarier issues iknow..And I don’t wanna bore.but feel it is my duty to raise these concerns if Spotify becomes ubiquitous.”

Speaking to Billboard today, Ek claims that “this is the single biggest shift since the inception of recorded music, 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.”

“In my home country, Sweden”, Ek continues, “Spotify is 70 percent of not just digital music revenue but all music revenue, including physical [album sales]. That’s what happens when you get to scale. One-third of the population uses Spotify – but people still use iTunes, too. This isn’t about which one you are supporting. An artist today should do everything [because] different consumers want different things.”

Ek also addresses the newly-launched Beats Music: “I don’t really view them as a competitor. The rest of the world seems to, for some reason. We want Spotify to be your music player. We don’t want to be the radio service; we don’t want to be the place where you watch a music video and then a cat the next moment. We want to be the place where you store and collect, where you build your playlist for your dinner party or your workout. That is very different from Pandora.”

You can read the full interview here. Moby, you may remember, referred to Thom Yorke as “like an old guy yelling at fast trains” in the wake of his comments about Spotify – something Yorke responded to here. You can read FACT’s 2013 interview with Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich here.

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