Dave Grohl on Taylor Swift Spotify Fight: ‘I Don’t F–king Care’
After weeks of heated debate about Spotify over Taylor Swift‘s decision to remove her discography from the streaming service, Dave Grohl has weighed in. “Me personally? I don’t fucking care,” the Foo Fighters frontman told Digital Spy. “That’s just me, because I’m playing two nights at Wembley [in London] next summer. I want people to hear our music. I don’t care if you pay $1 or fucking $20 for it; just listen to the fucking song. But I can understand how other people would object to that.”
In Grohl’s expletive-adorned opinion, the biggest hurdle for musicians is getting their work heard. “You want people to fucking listen to your music? Give them your music,” he said. “And then go play a show. They like hearing your music? They’ll go see a show. To me it’s that simple, and I think it used to work that way.” After reminiscing about his and his bandmates’ pasts playing in “crappy punk rock bands” and how they got their music heard by playing concerts, he said, “Nowadays there’s so much focus on technology that it doesn’t really matter.”
Last week, Swift shunned Spotify calling it a “grand experiment” that she felt did not fairly compensate artists. This week, country artist Jason Aldean removed his latest effort, Old Boots, New Dirt, from the service.
Spotify‘s founder, Daniel Ek fired back at Swift in a blog post that claimed the pop star could be making $6 million a year from the service. Swift’s manager, Scott Borchetta, disputed that number, claiming the singer’s catalog earned less than half a million dollars in the past 12 months.