The streaming model
Thom Yorke called Spotify the last desperate fart of a dying corpse.
July 2013. He pulled his solo catalogue and Atoms for Peace, then explained why on Twitter and in El País. A decade later the criticism is consensus and the artists are walking out for new reasons.
DeepTune editorial · June 2025 · 5 min read
In July 2013 Thom Yorke pulled The Eraser and the Atoms for Peace album Amok from Spotify. He gave the reason directly. New artists were getting paid badly, and the platform was structurally built to favour catalogues that already dominated the global feed at the expense of those that did not.
His exact phrasing, that streaming was "the last desperate fart of a dying corpse," got more attention than the substance. The substance was an early articulation of what is now the consensus position: the pro-rata pool sends listener money up the long tail, not down it.
Yorke and Nigel Godrich repeated the argument over the following decade. The industry called the position naive. By the mid-2020s the same argument was being made by everyone from independent labels to the major-label artists who could afford to say it out loud.
In 2025 NME ran a follow-up confirming Yorke's position has not softened. What changed between 2013 and 2025 is not the maths. The maths was the same. What changed is who was willing to say it out loud, and what they were willing to leave behind to make the point.
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