Is Black Keys’ Patrick Carney a long lost Gallagher brother? In the last few months to drummer has pulled out a number of gems such as labelling Nickelback ‘post-grunge crap, horrendous shit‘ and commenting that Lana Del Rey would be here today gone tomorrow.
This week, Carney has taken issue with Napster founder and Spotify board member Sean Parker who Carney has labelled an ‘asshole’ who made money ripping artists off, after Parker spoke at SXSW saying that within two years Spotify would overtake iTunes in total revenue.
“[Parker’s] an asshole. That guy has $2 billion that he made from figuring out ways to steal royalties from artists, and that’s the bottom line,” Carney said in an interview with radio station WGRD.
“You can’t really trust anybody like that. The idea of a streaming service, like Netflix for music, I’m totally not against it. It’s just we won’t put all of our music on it until there are enough subscribers for it to make sense.”
“Trust me, [Keys frontman] Dan [Auerbach] and I like to make money. If it was fair to the artist, we would be involved in it. I honestly don’t want to see Sean Parker succeed in anything,” he continued.
“I imagine if Spotify becomes something that people are willing to pay for, then I’m sure iTunes will just create their own service, and they’re actually fair to artists.”
For Spotify to become even close to competitive with iTunes it will have to see some serious growth over the coming years – iTunes currently controls about 70% of the legal download market in the United States alone.
It also isn’t the first time The Black Keys have come out against streaming services. Back in December last year they banned their new album El Camino from streaming on services like Pandora, Last.fm, Spotify, and Rdio, to reward the fans who actually went out and paid for the record.
“It’s becoming more popular, but it still isn’t at a point where you’re able to replace royalties from record sales with royalties from streams…” Carney said at the time.
“I think for unknown bands and smaller bands, it’s a really good thing to kind of get yourself out there… for a band that makes a living selling music, it’s not at a point to be feasible for us.”
In the meantime the rumour mill is in overdrive trying to guess when The Black Keys will make their long awaited return to Australian shores.
Speaking to Cherry Bar owner James Young after their show in New York last week Carney and guitarist Dan Auerbach revealed that if they’re not here in October they will be here for the Big Day Out in 2013.
