ozzy osbourne
19:41 Saturday, 21 May 2022
Spotify has long been in the crosshairs of many musicians due to their low pay rates. Some recent critics have been Failure, who pulled all their music from the service as part of a protest, and All That Remains vocalist Phil Labonte, recently said it's insane to "glibly act as if $0.0007 cents for every spin is fair." One band even went as far as writing 1,000 30-second songs because, in their own words, "Why write longer songs when we get paid little enough for just 30 seconds?"
Now in an interview with Classic Rock, Ozzy Osbourne has shared his very blunt opinion on the service – "Spotify is a fucking joke. The royalty aspect of making music has gone right down the toilet." Which is fair, considering the amount of money and time it costs to make music versus the financial output. And this is coming from Ozzy Osbourne, whose top 10 songs on Spotify have between 30 million and 438 million plays.
Elsewhere in the interview, Osbourne also laments the overall situation for young musicians. "It's a completely different world now," he said. "Before, you could do gigs and get spotted. Now, you buy a book on how to be a rock star, read it and go from there."