People made money off of selling songs that they worked really hard on for a really long time. "We’re getting way less than is normal." When Anderson tried to dismiss her, Jana fired back: "When you were young, that was the norm. Jana interjected that it's not the same: "Entitlement is when you want more than is normal," she said. Right now today, everybody here in this younger world here, everybody seems to think about entitlement," he complained. "This world that we live in is built on entitlement. 00001 more a stream."īased on my calculations, Anderson is technically a young Gen Xer or geriatric millennial, but his tirade against "entitled" young artists has big "OK, Boomer" energy. I mean, I consider myself an artist because I’m an inventor, okay? Now, I freely give away my patents for nothing. Anderson continued: "I have this issue with it, and we’ll call it entitlement. In 2014, she wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal arguing that "music should not be free" and subsequently pulled her album 1989 from Spotify. I mean, I have an issue with Taylor Swift’s comments," he said, referring to the pop star's long crusade for better streaming payouts to artists. 01, it’s still not that much." She also said she wasn't trying to attack Spotify, noting the "idea is to make it a win-win situation for all parties."Īnderson, however, went on a rant about Taylor Swift. She tried reasoning with him: "One cent is really not even that much money. Jana and Anderson's exchange went down two years ago, but according to Digital Music News, she sat on her recording of the conversation until last week in fear of retribution from the industry. Jana tried pointing out that now paltry royalties are the problem, but Anderson cut her off: "The problem was to distribute music. The problem was not to pay people money," he said. The problem was to get artists' music out there. The problem was this: piracy and music distribution. Singer-songwriter Ashley Jana pointedly asked why Spotify was so averse to paying artists $0.01 a stream (versus between $0.003 and $0.005 currently), and Anderson replied that was never the point. Jim Anderson, credited as the architect of the platform, was a keynote interview at the SyncSummit New York in June 2019. This PR effort to recast the streamer as the Switzerland of the music biz was sort of thwarted, however, when a recording recently emerged of a former Spotify executive calling artists "entitled" for lobbying for a bigger piece of the pie. Their solve is advising artists to sign stronger contracts with the people who own their music, basically. record labels, distributors, publishers - and not musicians themselves. In March, the streaming giant launched a website called Loud and Clear to "shed light on the complicated economics of music streaming." I'll spare you the three minutes it takes to watch a slick video on the topic: Spotify says paying artists more isn't their problem, because the streamer cuts checks to rights holders - i.e. Spotify has aggressively campaigned against the pervasive notion that they're stingy about paying artists.