Thom Yorke Compares YouTube to Nazi Germany
He loves AdBlock and “certainly” does not use the video-streaming platform.
In a recent interview with Italian newspaper La Repubblica, Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke compared YouTube to Nazi Germany because of how the streaming platform “[steals] art.” He shared:
“A friend of mine told me about this app to skip commercials on YouTube […] They put advertising before any content, making a lot of money and yet, artists are not paid or are paid smalls sums, and apparently this is fine for them. [...] People continue to say that this is an era where music is free, cinema is free. 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?”
He then went on to talk about the negative effects of digital music, explaining that it doesn’t give a feeling of personal relationship the way vinyls do.
“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.”
Check out translated portions of the conversation courtesy of NME, and access the original interview here.
