“We wouldn’t have joined it anyway, even if they had asked,” frontman Marcus Mumford told the The Daily Beast. “We don’t want to be tribal. I think small bands should get paid more for it… when they say it’s artist-owned, it’s owned by those rich, wealthy artists.”
They’re not exaggerating. After Jay Z bought the streaming music service for $56 million last month, he brought on well-known artists like Rihanna, Kanye West, Beyonce and Jack White as co-owners (and announced the partnership in grand fashion).
But, we also wouldn’t expect a superstar musician to call fellow big-name musicians who participated in the launch ceremony “new school fucking plutocrats.” Yes, those were the words out of Mumford & Sons guitarist’s Winston Marshall.
That being said, they believe in the power of technology and streaming music. “We don’t want to be part of some Tidal ‘streaming revolution’ nor do we want to be Taylor Swift and be anti-it,” said Marshall. “I don’t understand her argument, either… Music is changing. This is how people are going to listen to music now — streaming.”
It’s nice that Mumford & Sons believe in the little guys but keep in mind that they’re superstars themselves. Their last LP, Babel, sold 2.6 million copies in the US, they regularly headline on the festival circuit and they’re more famous than most bands dream to be.
Tidal’s usefulness (which, by the way, costs $20 per month for hi-fidelity music streaming) is still up in the air, but now we’re sure that the English folk rockers won’t join the bandwagon. And, they probably won’t be hanging with Jay Z anytime soon either.
