And now, Dave Grohl’s stance
Dave Grohl from an interview with Digital Spy on the Taylor Spotify narrative:
Me personally? I don’t fucking care. That’s just me, because I’m playing two nights at Wembley 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. You want people to fucking listen to your music? Give them your music. 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. When we were young and in really noisy, crappy punk rock bands there was no career opportunity and we loved doing it and people loved fucking watching it and the delivery was completely face to face and personal. That’s what got people really excited about shit. Nowadays there’s so much focus on technology that it doesn’t really matter.
A lot of stuff I agree with here. The only caveat to this approach is the fact that it does become very easy to take this stance when you have such large established success and are able to play Wembley for two nights next summer. Not all artists are in that position. That said, I truly believe that Dave Grohl followed the path that he laid out to other artists in this interview to get to where he is today. A lot of people can misconstrue that fact thinking that he is talking down from his high pedestal when he really isn’t. What also should be noted is the argument that true artists should be doing it for the music and would be happy to have anyone “just listen to the fucking song”, despite the lack of a career opportunity that he points out. The success, fame, and money really ought to be byproducts (if they even happen at all) of the fact that you are creating art for the art’s sake, not the other way around.
