Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich pull Amok and The Eraser from Spotify

Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich have taken Atoms for Peace's Amok off Spotify, along with Yorke's 2006 solo album The Eraser and the debut by Godrich's band Ultraista. Godrich announced it on Twitter on Sunday, calling it a small, meaningless rebellion. Radiohead's albums stay on the service.

The reason is that new artists get paid fuck all with this model

Nigel Godrich³

, Godrich wrote. Millions of streams earn a few thousand dollars, he says, and small labels and new acts cannot keep the lights on. Musicians, he adds, are afraid to speak up or opt out because they are told they will lose exposure. Taking Pink Floyd as his example, he says a catalogue that has already earned billions can sensibly sit on a streaming service, but had people streamed rather than bought records in 1973, The Dark Side of the Moon would probably have been too expensive to make.

Yorke retweeted him and added that the new artists people find on Spotify will not be paid, while shareholders will soon be rolling in it. When a follower told him the gesture only hurt fans, he said they were standing up for fellow musicians. Four Tet's Kieran Hebden backed them, saying he had taken his own music off Spotify for the same reason.

The producer Stephen Street, who made records with the Smiths and Blur, thought it a bit rich coming from Yorke. Radiohead's pay-what-you-want In Rainbows, he tweeted, had suited stars with years of EMI investment behind them and told people that music had no value. Yorke answered that for him In Rainbows was a statement of trust. people still value new music ..that's all we'd like from Spotify. don't make us the target.⁴

Spotify replied on Monday through an unnamed spokesperson that it had paid 500 million dollars to rights holders so far, expected to reach 1 billion by the end of 2013, and meant to be the most artist-friendly service there is. Godrich answered the same day. The money is shared out by each track's slice of all the streams, he said, so a major label's 40-year-old catalogue earns the same per play as a new artist's track, and the majors had done deals for favourable rates; finding a better way is the services' job, not the artists'.

Within two days of Godrich's tweets, Brian Message, Radiohead's co-manager, told BBC Newsnight that streaming is a new way for artists and fans to meet, and that as it grows, the people who make the music will get what they see as fair pay. As a manager of Thom I obviously sit up and take note when he says, 'Listen guys we need to look at how this works'.¹⁵ Godrich tweeted that Message had shares in Spotify and maybe that had something to do with it, then corrected himself to say Message might not, but it would not surprise him.