“Horribly devalued”: When Pink Floyd felt U2 had hit the final nail in music’s coffin in 2014
Thanks to the advent of streaming services, the main metric we tend to measure the success of bands by is the figures they manage to rack up through online attention rather than through the sales of physical media.
Purists who believe in the value of going to a record shop and buying something you’ll cherish are always going to hate that, but the truth is, we’ve slowly been shifting away from this for a long time. We’ve come to treat music as a commodity, but for anyone who is truly passionate about making music, the question ought to be asked as to whether the more important thing is to earn money from your art or for the music to be heard by as many people as possible.
Of course, artists at the lower end of the food chain aren’t able to think about this, as the financial gain is important to them, being able to earn a living and balance out the frankly extortionate cost of being a band in modern society. You’ve unfortunately got to play the game as the industry instructs you to until you’re big enough to play by your own rules, but if you’re already big enough and established, does it matter if the music is free?
Bootlegging and ripping your own copies of music to tape or CD was the controversial topic for a period of time, eventually surpassed by downloading from torrent sites before streaming giants became the go-to source for listening to music for next to no money. While popular acts like Radiohead and Wilco have both used pay-what-you-can and free download options for their albums in the past as alternative means of making their music more accessible, one notable method used by a band in 2014 seemed far more egregious despite still ostensibly being a free offer of music.
U2’s release of Songs of Innocence became a highly criticised stunt for how it was given away for free via Apple’s iTunes platform, automatically downloading itself to the music libraries of any users upon its release and being available for free, whether you cared or not.
Some applauded the ingenuity of the Irish band, disregarding the need to make money from their album, given how filthy rich the band already were by this point in their career, but equally, it didn’t impress others because of their stricter morals on music consumption. In the eyes of Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, who addressed the controversy of the album in a Rolling Stone interview in the immediate aftermath, all it did was cheapen the value of the art.
“It was so unexpected,” he began, before caveating with a statement about how it was “interesting that people took such umbrage at being given something.” However, his greater concern was over the impact of the art. “That does devalue things,” he continued. “Music has been horribly devalued by being given away. It’s funny they didn’t sense some of that. It’s been the big story of the 21st century, music being devalued.”
Pink Floyd, or rather Mason, might not like the idea of giving away their music, which is evident from the fact that their expanded reissues always seem to cost the same as a mortgage, but if a band actively chooses to give away their music for free, that’s on them. If anything, it does a lot to highlight the exploitative practices of streaming services that already give access to music for a pittance, so why not just cut out the middleman and drive people towards the music without the need for using a platform like this?
The real issue was never that U2 gave Songs of Innocence away for free, it was the fact that people who explicitly didn’t want it were given it anyway. While the consumer might want to consider the ways in which they engage with music and question the morality behind stealing from artists they like, they should also have a choice over what they consume, and for large amounts of iTunes users in 2014, U2 wasn’t what they wanted to hear.
