Charlie Benante, drummer for East Coast thrash metal legends Anthrax, and as of late, Texan groove metal kings Pantera, has shared his thoughts regarding Spotify and the current state of the music industry. The aforementioned digital service provider remains a contentious topic among musicians, especially as the company continues to post record high operating profits.
While some of that can be contributed to Spotify laying off around a quarter of its workforce last year in a bid to shore up their finances, others would dispute that it also comes from shifting policies detrimental to artists overall.
Among some of the more recent policies to be decried include no longer paying royalties to artists who don’t generate 1,000 streams yearly, and lowering songwriter mechanical royalty rates through select bundle packages involving audiobooks, among other practices.
Benante recently shared his thoughts on the matter in an interview with The Irish Times when asked if the music industry had changed for better or worse during his 40 plus years in it. He replied:
“There is no music industry. That’s what has changed. There is nothing any more. There are people listening to music, but they are not listening to music the way music was once listened to
It’s a different time now. Here’s a strange thing. While I have seen people eating a little bit more healthy here and there, the industry of music was one of things hit the worst and nobody did anything about it. They just let it happen. There was no protection, no nothing. Subconsciously this may be the reason why we don’t make records every three years or whatever because I don’t want to give it away for free.
I take music very seriously and what I do and what I write is very personal and, for someone to take it is not right. It is like I pay Amazon $12.99 a month and I can just go on Amazon and I can get whatever I want. It is basically stealing. It is stealing from the artist — the people who run music streaming sites like Spotify.
I don’t subscribe to Spotify. I think it is where music goes to die. We have the music on there because we have to play along with the fucking game, but I’m tired of playing the game.
We get taken advantage of the most out of any industry. As artists, we have no health coverage, we have nothing. They fucked us so bad, I don’t know how we come out of it. You’d probably make more money selling lemonade on the corner.”
The topic of Metallica‘s infamous 2000 lawsuit against P2P file sharing service Napster was then brought up. Essentially, the Bay Area thrash metal legends set out to curb the spread of pirated mp3 files of their copyrighted material on that service.
As perhaps one of the most publicized efforts to combat musical piracy on the internet, not everyone was on the side of the band, nor drummer Lars Ulrich, who became a figurehead during the case.
Advocates for filesharing encouraged the spread of music, arguing the lack of a barrier to entry would be more beneficial to artists overall. Others took issue with the amount of filler being pumped out by major labels, often finding themselves dissatisfied with lack of quality material on an album after being hooked in by a hit single.
Beyond that, price gouging on CDs was practiced regularly by numerous major labels and retailers from 1995 to 2000. A settlement worth roughly $143 million was reached in 2002, with numerous major labels and music retailers being made to foot the bill for their participation in the inflating the prices at an estimated $500 million cost to customers
In light of high-profile developments like that, the act of pirating music almost became a retaliatory response against being taken advantage of for years. When asked by The Irish Times if he felt that Metallica were right in taking legal action over the matter, Benante replied:
“They were absolutely right about it. You see where it went. All those people who said, ‘Fuck METALLICA. They are rich bastards’. They were protecting their art, their intellectual property so that some asshole does not come along and take your art. They make the money while you just make the art and you just give it away. People don’t know anything about this. Until you have lived the way we live and do what we have done, then you can comment on it.”
