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"I see streaming services as quite exciting ways
to get to people. In the end, that's what we want for U2 songs,"
the U2 lead singer said on Thursday at a Web Summit conference.
His comments came the same week that U.S. singer Taylor Swift
pulled her entire catalog from the popular streaming site
Spotify as she released her new album "1989" that immediately
soared to the top of the U.S. charts.
Swift's label Big Machine has declined to comment on why it had
asked for Swift's albums to be removed from Spotify, a free
service that also offers subscription fees to users who want to
eliminate advertising.
But in an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal in July, Swift
wrote that music was valuable and "it's my opinion that music
should not be free".
Bono, while not referring directly to Swift, defended Spotify,
which he said pays out 70 percent of its revenues to record
labels.
"The real enemy is not between digital downloads or streaming.
The real enemy, the real fight is between opacity and
transparency. The music business has historically involved
itself in quite considerable deceit," Bono said.
"But if we change that bit, and people can actually see how many
times they're being played, where they're being played, get
access to information on the people who are listening to them,
get paid direct debit ... I think those payments will add up to
something, as the world gets more transparent."
He also defended U2's decision to give away its latest album,
"Songs of Innocence", as a free download on iTunes.
The move backfired when many iTunes users complained that the
album was consuming memory space or thought they may have been
charged for it.
"We got a lot of people who were uninterested in U2 to be mad
with U2. And I would call that an improvement in the
relationship," Bono said.
(Reporting by Conor Humphries; Writing by Michael Roddy; Editing
by Crispian Balmer)
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