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Image via Pretty Much Amazing
Throwing around comparisons to Nazi Germany might be a bit intense, but Thom Yorke has strong feelings about YouTube. In an interview with Italian newspaper La Repubblica, he said that YouTube doesn’t allow creators to earn a profit from their creative works:
“People continue to say that this is an era where music is free, cinema is free,” he said. “It’s not true. The creators of services make money – Google, YouTube. A huge amount of money, by trawling, like in the sea – they take everything there is. ‘Oh, sorry, was that yours? Now it’s ours. No, no, we’re joking – it’s still yours’. They’ve seized control of it – it’s like what the Nazis did during the Second World War. Actually, it’s like what everyone was doing during the war, even the English – stealing the art of other countries. What difference is there?”
Not only does Yorke not care for YouTube, but he is super critical of digital music as a whole, saying the medium has a detrimental effect on the creation of music:
“Recently I got out all the vinyl that I had. Stuff collected over a lifetime… with every single vinyl there’s a relationship. Like when I’m DJing: there’s this direct contact, you have to take the disc, choose it, put it in a bag, and put the bags in the taxi and then you have to get them down, open them and so on. That relationship doesn’t exist with digital files, USB sticks. And that has a corrosive effect on how music is made.”
Find the original interview—which is in Italian—here. NME has translated portions of the conversation, which you can find here.
