The British folk botherers have blasted Jay Z’s new streaming platform.
Mumford & Sons have slammed the new Tidal streaming service in an interview with The Daily Beast. The band’s guitarist Winston Marshall described the superstar musicians helping market the service as “new school fucking plutocrats”.
Frontman Marcus Mumford had even more to say on the subject, specifically criticising the “tribalistic” nature of the platform. You can read his thoughts below.
Tidal was launched on March 31 with Rihanna, Beyoncé, Deadmau5, Daft Punk and more appearing in one of the most awkward press conferences in recent memory.
“We wouldn’t have joined it anyway, even if they had asked. We don’t want to be tribal. I think smaller bands should get paid more for it, too. Bigger bands have other ways of making money, so I don’t think you can complain. A band of our size shouldn’t be complaining. And when they say it’s artist-owned, it’s owned by those rich, wealthy artists.
“We don’t want to be part of some Tidal ‘streaming revolution’ nor do we want to be Taylor Swift and be anti-it. I don’t understand her argument, either. The focus is slightly missed. Music is changing. It’s fucking changing. This is how people are going to listen to music now—streaming. So diversify as a band. It doesn’t mean selling your songs to adverts. We look at our albums as stand-alone pieces of art, and also as adverts for our live shows.
“What I’m not into is the tribalistic aspect of it—people trying to corner bits of the market, and put their face on it. That’s just commercial bullshit. We hire people to do that for us rather than having to do that ourselves. We just want to play music, and I don’t want to align myself with Spotify, Beats, Tidal, or whatever. We want people to listen to our music in their most comfortable way, and if they’re not up for paying for it, I don’t really care.
“Smaller bands have a better opportunity in the music industry now than they’ve ever had, because you don’t need to have a record deal to have your music listened to worldwide. It’s democratized the music industry. So as much as it sucks, and they need to figure out how to represent people fairly financially, you’ve never been able to get your music listened to more easily.” [via The Daily Beast]
