Top Electronic Dance Music DJ, producer, and former Swedish House Mafia star Steve Angello has come out in favor of streaming services like Spotify and says they're the best thing ever for the music business. He says the problems artists are having with payment for streaming comes down to their labels, not the streamers themselves.
Angello made the comments during the annual Web Summit Internet conference in Ireland. The DJ now performs solo and continues to run his own record label, Size. Being a former member of a top grossing live EDM act Swedish House Mafia, the group performed at and sold out huge venues such as the Madison Square Garden in New York.
"Downloading and streaming is the evolution of music services," Angello proclaimed at the conference. "A lot of people are fighting it, but I think it's the best thing that ever happened."
The difference between Angello and other artists who have complained about Spotify recently, such as James Blunt, Joanna Newsom, and most famously Taylor Swift, is that Angello owns his own record label. He says the streaming services are paying, it's just that because the labels have nondisclosure agreements with the streaming service that prohibit them from revealing the terms of their agreements, the labels are to blame if artists are not being compensated fairly.
Angelo blasted a lot of the critics of the streaming services for doing so just in order to receive publicity, and questioned their reasoning for not allowing their music to be streamed on services like Spotify. "I see it as record stores -- why would I not allow a record store to release it? A 15-year-old might not to be able to afford Apple, Spotify, Tidal and Google. Why would you limit those guys from hearing your music?"
While that all makes perfect sense, Angello has to understand that most musicians and recording artists do not have their own record labels. Therefore, they don't see the payments and the profits coming in from streaming as he does, being both the artist and the label owner. Of course most artists don't want to limit exposure to their music, it's just that they want to be compensated fairly for it. Even the biggest recording artists are at the mercy of their labels when it comes to being paid for streaming.
