Dee Snider has never been one to mince words. The Twisted Sister frontperson is now the latest musician to take aim at Spotify for its well-known offensively meagre royalty rates for artists, saying CEO Daniel Ek "should be taken out and shot."
Snider appeared on a recent episode of the Jeremy White Show podcast alongside Starship's Mickey Thomas to have a wide-ranging conversation — as well as to promote Snider's new book, Dee Snider: He's Not Gonna Take It. Of course, when you get two music industry vets together, the current state of affairs in the streaming economy is bound to come up, and there were no holds barred.
"That guy from Spotify, I wanna tell you, he should be taken out and shot," Snider said [as transcribed by Blabbermouth], presumably referring to the streaming giant's shiny figurehead, Ek. "When he heard that artists were complaining about how little we get paid, his response was 'make more music' — like we're producing cans of Coke. Just [increase] the production. [It's] insulting and belittling."
The singer went on to claim that he's "not getting anything" financially from Spotify streams by the band's millions of monthly listeners, and his real revenue these days is from licensing endless placements of Twisted Sister hits like "We're Not Gonna Take It."
"The licensing is the last godsend, the last oasis where you can actually make some money," he explained. "Steven Spielberg chooses 'We're Not Gonna Take It' for the finale of Ready Player One. Thank you, God, 'cause I'm not getting anything from Spotify."
You can listen to the full interview below.
Fellow hairography icon "Weird Al" Yankovic is also among the latest to decry Spotify's puny payouts, surmising that he had earned about enough to pay for a nice sandwich from his 80 million streams on the platform in 2023.
Snider appeared on a recent episode of the Jeremy White Show podcast alongside Starship's Mickey Thomas to have a wide-ranging conversation — as well as to promote Snider's new book, Dee Snider: He's Not Gonna Take It. Of course, when you get two music industry vets together, the current state of affairs in the streaming economy is bound to come up, and there were no holds barred.
"That guy from Spotify, I wanna tell you, he should be taken out and shot," Snider said [as transcribed by Blabbermouth], presumably referring to the streaming giant's shiny figurehead, Ek. "When he heard that artists were complaining about how little we get paid, his response was 'make more music' — like we're producing cans of Coke. Just [increase] the production. [It's] insulting and belittling."
The singer went on to claim that he's "not getting anything" financially from Spotify streams by the band's millions of monthly listeners, and his real revenue these days is from licensing endless placements of Twisted Sister hits like "We're Not Gonna Take It."
"The licensing is the last godsend, the last oasis where you can actually make some money," he explained. "Steven Spielberg chooses 'We're Not Gonna Take It' for the finale of Ready Player One. Thank you, God, 'cause I'm not getting anything from Spotify."
You can listen to the full interview below.
Fellow hairography icon "Weird Al" Yankovic is also among the latest to decry Spotify's puny payouts, surmising that he had earned about enough to pay for a nice sandwich from his 80 million streams on the platform in 2023.