Thom Yorke has launched another attack on the music industry. Yorke has previously laid into Spotify - describing the streaming service as “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse”. In a new interview with Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, Yorke has directed his vitriol against YouTube and G...
Thom Yorke has launched another attack on the music industry.
Yorke has previously laid into Spotify – describing the streaming service as “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse”.
In a new interview with Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, Yorke has directed his vitriol against YouTube and Google.
“People continue to say that this is an era where music is free, cinema is free,” Yorke told the Italian newspaper, reports Wired. “It’s not true. The creators of services make money – Google, YouTube. A huge amount of money, by trawling, like in the sea – they take everything there is.”
“Oh, sorry, was that yours? Now it’s ours. No, no, we’re joking – it’s still yours’. They’ve seized control of it – it’s like what the Nazis did during the Second World War. Actually, it’s like what everyone was doing during the war, even the English – stealing the art of other countries. What difference is there?”
Meanwhile, Yorke recently claimed that advisers of Tony Blair “tried to blackmail” him into meeting with the former British Prime Minister.
Speaking in interview with Paris-based magazine Télérama, Yorke claims that the incident took place when he was a spokesperson for climate change campaign The Big Ask in 2003.
The musician was working on behalf of environmental organisation Friends of the Earth to lobby politicians on the issue of climate change.
“We were in the midst of the Iraq War and The Big Ask campaign was proving very successful,” explains Yorke in the interview. “So Blair said: ‘‘I should meet this guy’’. Then Blair’s advisors tried to blackmail me, saying: ‘‘if you don’t agree to meet the Prime Minister, Friends of the Earth will be denied all access to him.’’ because of the Iraq war, I didn’t want to do it. I felt it was morally unacceptable for me to be photographed with Blair.
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