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Thom Yorke likens YouTube and Google to wartime art looting
Thom Yorke has compared the way Google and YouTube take artists' work to the Nazis' seizure of art in the Second World War, in a long interview with the Italian daily La Repubblica translated into English on 30 November.
He finds new music mostly through Boomkat, the online record shop, and certainly not on YouTube. YouTube puts adverts before everything and makes a lot of money while the artists get little or nothing. It's like what the Nazis did during the Second World War. In fact they all did that during the war, the British too: steal the art from other countries.
1 He has no answer to the problem, but he won't accept that music and film are now free.
He only goes back to old Radiohead songs when he has to relearn them for the stage, and the people on them are strangers to him. Who the hell are these people? Was I really like this? I don't totally remember doing all of this.
1 He feels the same replaying The Eraser.
Putting out Tomorrow's Modern Boxes through BitTorrent was a reaction to everyone talking only about Spotify. Asked whether it worked, he answers No, not exactly. But I wanted it to be an experiment.
1 One artist cannot carry all of a label's work, he says, but he is glad he tried.
These days he is preoccupied with the Japanese band Boris. He does an hour or two of yoga a day and makes his dancing up as he goes; he is, he says, a terrible dancer.
The cryptic lines he has been posting on Twitter are only notes, mostly written after an argument about Spotify with a troll, and they may or may not end up on the next Radiohead album. That album is not ready. And, anyways, I could not say if it was. It would get me into trouble.
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