Charlie Benante Slams Music Streaming: “We Get Taken Advantage of Most Out of Any Industry”
When Spotify came along, it seemed like a miracle. Instead of spending money on every individual album that a band puts out, you can now listen to any album ever put out by almost any artist for a small monthly fee. What’s not to love? But it seems pretty obvious that, when the business model for music becomes this much more affordable, someone has to be getting screwed over in the process. Pantera touring drummer and Anthrax studio drummer Charlie Benante certainly thinks it’s an unfair way to do business.
In a recent interview with The Irish Times, Benante was asked what has changed about the music industry in the 40 years he’s been in it, and Benante went off:
“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 f*****g 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 f**ked us so bad, I don’t know how we come out of it. You’d probably make more money selling lemonade on the corner.”
Now, Benante has a lot of good points in there, certainly. But “We get taken advantage of most out of any industry” is maybe a thing he shouldn’t have said. Yeah, I’m sure sweatshop workers in Bangladesh, strippers in toxic working environments, and those people in prison who are forced to work as firefighters are really feeling bad for rock stars right now.
Still, he has a point. But, in the same interview, he defended Metallica over their controversial stance against Metallica in the late-90s/early-2000s. But the fact is that piracy came about because records were so expensive and people really wanted an alternative, an alternative that Spotify provided. The fact that piracy and streaming services have taken off suggests that there’s a need for some sort of better system than paying for each record individually. Maybe it’s time to find a compromise between paying $12 for each record and paying $12 a month for all the records in the world, because there has to be a middle ground.
