They Might Be Giants Ask, “Why Can’t We Get a Statement from Spotify?”

…from a Bloomberg interview this week:

Pimm Fox (Host): So you brought us up to the 1990s, but, you stopped —

John Flansburgh: But then there’s the dynamic internet years, the failed Vodka launches [laughs], um … no we basically got into MP3s right as the whole Napster thing was happening.  And we actually released an album online very early on.  And, we’ve embraced a lot of technologies as they’ve come along, and what’s funny is that if you just take that on as a posture, people tend to think of you as being very market savvy, or brand — thinking about what your brand is doing.  But I think for us, it’s just an excuse to do a different kind of work.

Fox: So I wanted to tie back to MP3s for just for a moment, because of course now streaming music is Pandora, is Spotify, or is all of these kinds of things —

Flansburgh: — all that money.<!–/*
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Flansburgh: I keep on wondering why you can’t get a legitimate statement from Spotify and Pandora.  It’s like that part of it has to remain a mystery.  But when you consider that everything — the records are so easy to keep now, why can’t they just pass them along to the artist?

Fox: Like tell you how many people listened…

Flansburgh: Yeah. Absolutely.

Fox: …and how many songs they listened to, and what songs they liked the most?

Flansburgh: Absolutely.

John Linnell: Well it’s like the IRS, the nerve center actually has the least amount of information about themselves.

Flansburgh: I think it’s more like Netflix, that they just don’t want you to know.  There are so many hit shows on Netflix.

Linnell: Well I think that’s what the IRS is good at.

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Source: Industry News