Thom Yorke tells musicians to fight Spotify

Thom Yorke has called on musicians to stand up to Spotify, in an interview with the Mexican website Sopitas reported in English on 4 October. In July he and Nigel Godrich took Amok and Yorke's solo album The Eraser off the service. Most of Radiohead's records, including The Bends, OK Computer and Kid A, are still on it.

The way people listen to music is going through a big change, Yorke says. I feel like as musicians we need to fight the Spotify thing.² He won't accept the industry's line that this is all that is left. 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.² The old business will die, and much of what replaces it could be bad. On Twitter the same day he allowed that there were bigger issues, but said he felt it his duty to raise these concerns in case Spotify became ubiquitous.

Spotify runs on old records from the major labels, in his view, and the labels back it because it lets them sell their back catalogues again for nothing, make a fortune and survive. So the fight is over whether music has a future at all, and film and books with it. According to reports of the interview, he compares the moment with the arrival of the printing press, and says Adam Curtis, the documentary maker who has just worked with Massive Attack, is making the same argument, and that people like Curtis, Massive Attack and Yorke himself need to stand together.

For Yorke, the most exciting thing about the In Rainbows release in 2007 was the direct line it opened between the band and the people listening, with nobody in the middle. Now Spotify wants to stand in that gap and become the gatekeeper to all of it. We don't need you to do it. No artists needs you to do it. We can build the shit ourselves, so fuck off.²