If you don’t believe this is an increasingly serious shortcoming for the Swedish service, consider the fact that four out of the Top 5 albums in the UK right now aren’t on its platform. Yet Radiohead certainly haven’t helped Spotify’s exclusivity problem: something which this year alone is mushrooming to epidemic proportions. In isolation, A Moon Shaped Pool’s exclusive arrival on Apple Music and TIDAL – and Radiohead’s decision to blackball Spotify – won’t be a giant concern to Daniel Ek.Īs we reported on Sunday, Radiohead were the 199th most popular act on Spotify when the new album arrived, and have since risen to 196th.Ĭompare the group’s 4.7m monthly listeners to Drake, with his 31.6m, and their limited reach on Ek’s platform becomes clear.
To a degree, fans are now once again being asked to ‘pay what you want’ for a new Radiohead album – so long as, in streaming’s case, it’s more than $9.99 a month. Radiohead put their own flag in the ground over music’s value back in 2007, of course, launching a controversial ‘pay what you want’ experiment with In Rainbows. Whispers suggest Yorke’s attitude to Spotify has mellowed since these diatribes, and that Radiohead’s decision to provide the service with two tracks from their new album, A Moon Shaped Pool, indicates at least a partial reconciliation. The Radiohead frontman was deeply angry with Spotify in particular, angry with a platform handing major labels millions of dollars a day – plus significant equity stakes – while songwriters counted their shrapnel. It’s easy to forget that Yorke’s anti-Spotify crusade, abetted by producer Nigel Godrich, was far more pointed and sustained than one show-stealing comment about trumping cadavers. Thom Yorke there, being typically timid and retiring about the virtues of Daniel Ek‘s service back in 2013. “As musicians we need to fight the Spotify thing… all these f*ckers get in the way… We don’t need you… so f*ck off.”
(The views in these articles are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by our supporter.) This week, we discuss reaction to Radiohead’s decision to place their album on Apple Music and TIDAL – but blackball Spotify. Each week, The MBW Review gives our take on some of the biggest news stories of the previous seven days.