Roger Waters Slams Digital Music Companies
While artists like Taylor Swift have found it fashionable to be anti-Spotify, a music industry 
veteran like Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fame truly understands just how much the digital music revolution has affected the earning potential for those making and selling music nowadays.
“I feel enormously privileged to have been born in 1943 and not 1983,” said Waters in a recent interview with The Times. “To have been around when there was a music business and the takeover by Silicon Valley hadn’t happened, and in consequence, you could still make a living writing and recording songs and playing them to people. When this gallery of rogues and thieves had not yet injected themselves between the people who aspire to be creative and their potential audience and steal every fucking cent anybody ever made.”
Back in January, Waters’ former Pink Floyd Cohort, Nick Mason, offered a similar point of view during an interview with Rolling Stone. When touching on the backlash U2 received for how the band gifted its Songs of Innocence album to iTunes account holders, Mason said:
“Look, U2 are a great band, and Bono’s an extraordinary individual, so this isn’t an anti-U2 tirade. But it highlights a vital aspect to the whole idea of music in the 21st century. What’s also interesting is that Apple seem to have got off scot-free. No one’s blaming them. Apple has done great things, but it has also contributed to the devaluation process [of music].”
Despite having similar viewpoints on this matter, don’t expect to see Waters and Mason in Pink Floyd together ever again.
“A reunion is out of the question,” added Waters in his interview with The Times. “Life after all gets shorter and shorter the closer you get to the end of it and time becomes more and more precious and in my view should be entirely devoted to doing the things you want to do. One can’t look backwards.”
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