The conversation around streaming royalties has brought a lot of heat to Spotify’s door over the last few years, and now Alice in Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell is speaking out against it. In a recent interview with Primordial Radio, Cantrell shared his perspective on the situation.
“And as far as keeping your publishing, that was a real battle and very few artists did that,” recalled Cantrell. “The new model has taken that and kind of intensified it a bit. I was looking at – I can’t remember the artist – but I was looking at something that gets millions and millions of streams or whatever, and people are being paid 1000th of a cent every time it’s played.”
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Cantrell said that he sees himself as “a real advocate for artists’ rights” then adding that back “in the old days, when you got played on the radio, that turned into like a penny or something then, and that adds up.”
“The new model of the streaming platform has really taken the old model of really being a small cut to the artist and made it really even smaller,” Cantrell continued. “So the prices to do business – rent a bus, gas, fuel, salaries, travel – they all continue to go up and the income continues to go down for artists of all sizes now.
Cantrell blasted the streaming royalties structure as “a bad business model,” and added, “It would be nice to see it a little bit fairer toward the artist.”
Finally, the grunge musician offered, “The landscape is always moving, the clock is always running and you can count on the fact that it’s changing. And so that’s part of life, is as you go through the days, weeks and years to try to feel the changes, be aware of them, try to adapt to them and figure out how to operate.”
