Jerry Cantrell says streaming is a “bad business model”

Streaming services have billions of users worldwide, so there’s no denying their success from a listener standpoint. But what about for the artists whose music is their lifeblood? Well, in the words of Alice in Chains’ Jerry Cantrell, from this perspective, streaming is a “bad business model”. Speaking to [transcribed by ], the guitarist explains that while streaming is cutting into artist earnings, it is simply an “intensified” version of the model the music industry has operated on for years.

“The music business really wasn’t set up in a very equitable way,” he says. “It was kind of predatory loans to bands that you paid back at 75 cents on the dollar. “And as far as keeping your publishing, that was a real battle and very few artists did that.



The new model has taken that and kind of intensified it a bit. I was looking at – I can’t remember the artist – but I was looking at something that gets millions and millions of streams or whatever, and people are being paid 1000th of a cent every time it’s played. “In the old days, when you got played on the radio, that turned into like a penny or something then, and that adds up.

I’m a real advocate for artists’ rights, man.” He goes on: “The new model of the streaming platform has really taken the old model of really being a small cut to the artist and made it really even smaller. So the prices to do business – rent a bus, gas, fuel, salaries, travel – they all continue to go up and the income continues to go down for artists of all sizes now.

“It’s a bad business model. It would be nice to see it a little bit fairer toward the artist. The landscape is always moving, the clock is always running and you can count on the fact that it’s changing.

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