Gomez's Tom Gray: How to Fight Spotify in Parliament and Why One Difficult Conversation a Day Is Enough - Part 2

0:00Welcome back to the Drowning Sound podcast. In part two of my conversation with Tom Gray from the band Gomez, from the Ivers Academy, from the Broken Record campaign and various other hats and shoes that he's worn over the years, we get much more into the campaigning side of his work, how he has tried to address some of the biggest problems in music from streaming to AI over the last decade. and what that process is like, what we can learn from the way essentially he's lobbied politicians, but also having to build the campaign with other artists getting involved. And yes, we do mention Kate Bush and Paul McCartney and various other people that he's managed to get signed letters in this episode.

0:46It is definitely one of the most useful conversations I've had for understanding a lot more of the process without it being at all boring. Maybe that's just me. You can obviously send me a note if you think that we went maybe too much in and we should have edited some of this out. But yeah, this was a long chat and Joe Rogan length. And we do talk about kind of Spotify giving all that money to Joe Rogan and how better it could be spent to benefit music. And I really, really liked Tom's answer towards the end of this episode. In this episode, we do talk about Kevin Bacon, both the record producer and the actor with the famous how many people are you away from Kevin Bacon?

1:29My number is very low, as I will tell you in this episode. But also we talk about Kevin Brennan, the member of the House of Lords, who was an MP in Wales, and the Brennan Bill. Although at the time of recording this podcast, I thought I was going to have recorded that interview and published it already. Actually, that's going to come out in a few weeks time because I haven't recorded it yet, that Kevin's trains was cancelled to go up to hold our conference I was at. So therefore we didn't get a chance to sit down and chat. Also, I should probably note, we recorded this podcast in early June and I'm recording this intro on Sunday, the 21st of June.

2:09And I don't know who is prime minister right now. And that's not because I've had a hit on the head just because right at the time of recording, it sounds like Keir Starmer might stand down and Andy Burnham might step in. So if anything, this podcast sounds a bit weird when we talk about who the Prime Minister is. That's the only reason. Time. Because things get pre-recorded. And you might be listening to this in 2028 and you know that already. Anyway, this is the Drowning Sound podcast brought to you in partnership with Kobuz. And we make a companion playlist to go with every episode. And if you go to drowningsound.org forward slash playlists, you can find the companion to go with My Conversation with Tom Gray, which features tracks from Frightened Rabbit, it tim buckley maybe tilly and friends if after i record this i can find some of those tracks and drop them on um and i'll put a few other bits and bobs but yeah lots of go-me's and lots of other things so that's dranninsound.org forward slash playlist where you can also get a 30-day free trial to co-buds the much more ethical streaming platform which pays artists more than the other platforms and has music in really high quality so yeah you know where to go thank you for them for partnering with us on our podcast because they make this podcast possible.

3:21Now, back to my conversation with Tom Gray at the Shore Studios in London.

3:37In an interesting parallel, and I mentioned Water earlier, but Virgil Sharkey's campaigning, he was in the Untones, he was at UK Music, and he spent most of the last five ten years trying to get off what and the water companies which are literally a monopoly in pretty much every place they exist um to be more transparent about where the money's going and to ensure that the money's being reinvested rather than just going to shareholders yeah and like i think for me like the big things with spotify that i've and i like anyone that listens to this podcast now i've got a regular question i ask everyone it's like what would you do with the 500 million that spotify spent on joe rogan because that's how much they invested in his podcast i mean i think it's essentially advanced against future advertising income but it was to make his podcast exclusive to them to take it to literally remove it from the marketplace for other people to bring people into spotify to tune into his podcast and that is a podcast that's platform Donald Trump climate deniers like I don't think I've ever heard musicians on it like I don't think Paul McCartney's going on there to promote his new album so Spotify decided they've got all this money from the music ecosystem and they've put it into this pretty toxic podcaster who doesn't mind spreading misinformation it's worse than that they used their bundling deals in the states to more or less half the amount they paid to songwriters over there in the past year and a half.

5:10I mean... And now you can do an AI remix for song and how does anyone get paid for that? How does anyone get paid for that? Yeah. And Universal have just sold their shares in Spotify and who's getting that money? Yeah. Even though it was leveraged off the controlling the master shares and the publishing of lots of songwriters and artists. Because technically you were signed to Virgin which is now owned by Universal. So wouldn't you technically get, if you're still signed there, there I don't know if you got the rights back wouldn't you technically I've got a forever debt with Universal yeah so would some of that go into your recoupment I don't know if they'd notify me that they've got some money into my forever debt

5:51yeah no I doubt it I mean it's amazing that you sold all those records and you still didn't it's amazing yeah you can make you know 15 million quid for a label and owe them 600 ,000 pounds I don't know how the maths work but it's just one of those Do they send you an annual reminder of what your debt is? Honestly no I don't really pay attention to it I've never really cared about that and genuinely the reason one of the reasons I started getting involved moving into advocacy in the mid sort of 2016 I came off the road when my son was quite young I wanted to be, when he started school, I wanted to do the school runs and stuff.

6:37And my wife's a teacher and I wanted to be the one who sort of walked him to school and back because she couldn't do that. And so when the band finished our album contract with ATO in New York in 2013, when the record industry was on its absolute arse, I became a, you know, stay at home dad, composing and stuff. And basically it was probably a couple of years after that. Obviously, it's worth saying I'd stayed in politics, you know, working on campaigns and stuff. I would do data and stuff for people and had kind of kept a hand in. I grew up in the labor movement, you know, was on miners' marches when I was, you know, 13 and stuff like that.

7:15And so that was kind of, you know, I'd carried on doing that alongside everything else. And I think some friends, it actually might be a songwriter called Ian Archer. Yeah. He's a very close friend. He's wrote lots of songs that you'll know. Big Snow Patrol bands. Yeah, Ron, but Hold Back the River, James Blake, who wrote Thunderbolt with Jake Borg. That was the artist name I was trying to remember earlier when I said Ben Howard. Yeah. And so he was just saying, oh, you know, we sort of need you to get involved with these organizations to me. Because he knew how political I was and how kind of just how my brain worked.

7:51He was like, I think you'd be really useful. And I was like, I started looking around. I was like, yeah, these organizations, there was lots, you know, obviously the Ivers, the FAC, the MU I was like they're all you know they all exist but like they don't seem the public affair stuff doesn't seem to be the interaction with government stuff doesn't seem to be quite necessarily be happening as much as you'd hope there's a lot of people holding up card signs yeah a lot of that and I was like well this isn't that's not how you do it and so I started looking around you know who I could help and kind of bobbed in and then when I found Basker as it then was what's that stand for again?

8:30British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors

8:36Crispin Hunt had been there for a while and he had second long pigs mention I know, I know, incredible had managed to build a sort of democratic a really good democratic structure there which was the main thing for me so I didn't want to get involved where I didn't know I don't like fiefdoms I don't like, you know, that person's the boss for life. All that stuff makes me feel really queasy. Describing the reform party. Well, yeah, you know what I mean? All of that stuff just makes me really queasy. And so I can't, and because I can take up a lot of space, I know that I could very easily find myself sort of, it's almost to protect myself from my worst instincts.

9:20I don't want to be the person who just, you know. Steam rolls through. Yeah, exactly. and doesn't do what the organization or the everyone involved in it might want like having that sent and also it's easier to argue when you've got 10 000 people behind you or like the MU like I've got was it 135 000 I think it's I am accountable I'm responsible I have to keep being transparent I have to keep paying attention so I and I was like look you guys aren't doing you need you know this policy work doing we need to get this person in you know And so I kind of helped them over. They were in a pretty poor state eight years ago, you know.

9:58And, you know, we built that up. And when we get to like 2020, when the streaming stuff, well, basically when COVID hits, genuinely like in the February of that year, I just was like, we need to go hard on streaming now because everyone's about to lose their touring income. everyone's that we're going to lose public licensing we're going to lose hairdressers and they're all going to close down and we need to go yeah and basically basker wasn't ready or it might have been the ivors by then and the mu weren't ready um and i'd stayed out of the governance i hadn't got myself elected into any kind of position i wasn't like i was just like this guy who was just like consulting yeah on everything with all of them.

10:52And I went, all right, I'm just going to have to go alone. So that's when I just did broken record. Because I was like... Which began as a Twitter thread, didn't it? It began as a Twitter thread, yeah. And just that hashtag. Yeah. Which became much bigger than I suspected. But the point is, you know, it was just like, this is the situation we're looking at. and I was getting I was getting calls from friends who were like going I don't know I'm going to pay for my kids nappies if I'm going to be off the road for six months and that scared the shit out of me which is crazy like I know that the argument is artists make their money from touring but as we've discussed on some recent episodes most artists are not making their money from touring very successful artists are making their money from touring but the average artist is not necessarily it's not that lucrative but if you're a session musician playing in like I'm sure playing in Empire of the Sun for instance doing big festival shows that's a lucrative job that's lucrative yeah there's massive inequalities across the piece which is why it's always like how do we build how do we build it for everyone well not for everybody because it can't be for everybody because you know I don't think every kid with a kazoo should be able to make money for music people who've devoted themselves to it who have a talent for it and the world's noticed.

12:14And an audience. Yeah, and the world's noticed, yeah. Those people should be able to have a living from it. And it's as simple as that. And so it's just how do you redistribute across that curve? How do you get it back out? That's really the thing. And then that led to lots of other things. It led to the economics of streaming thing. The Brennan Bill. So, yeah, okay. So what this is, Kevin Brennan's a very important, in all of this and you know he's a ride or a die Kevin Brennan brilliant man you know talk to him right yeah I don't know by the time this episode comes out hopefully that episode with Kevin will be out and they'll know exactly what you mean because he's a musician he's a Labour MP but he's now in the House of Lords and we've discussed the fan-led review on this podcast a bit and yeah he was crucial because he so Kevin really like dug in with the the select committee.

13:12He was the main sort of driving force behind that, which was a conservative-controlled select committee. And then about a year later, maybe about six months later, he calls me and says, oh, the chief whip's just been on the phone. They asked me, do I want to put in for a private member's bill? And I said, I hope he said yes. He said, did I say yes? And I said, yeah, call him back and say he said yes. and we literally in the space of about 10 minutes had to come up with a name for a bill. I was like, music, musicians' rights, something, remuneration, et cetera. Kevin or I remember the name of it, better than me.

13:56No one likes to say the word remuneration. Yeah, yeah. Remuneration really kills everybody.

14:05Unbelievably, he'd been in Parliament for 20 years and that was the first time we'd ever won the lottery for the private members' bill, and it got drawn first. So it was absolutely going to get debated, right? Which scared the bejesus out of the music industry. And they didn't know what it was going to say until we published the draft. Of course, you know, really what we did, I worked with, you know, obviously with Kevin and a couple of lawyers based in Europe. What we essentially did was take a lot of stuff that was in the copyright directive, the European copyright directive, and try to translate that into what would be a model version of it in British copyright law.

14:52Because if you're a bit further back in 2016, the European Union had passed this thing called the copyright directive, which actually had a right to fair remuneration in it. but because it was the last thing through the door before Brexit because it had EU written on it the Tories killed it even though it was literally the Conservative government that had helped move it through Brussels so it just didn't happen and in many ways I would argue why the copyright directive didn't come into European legislatives as well as it should have done it's because the British weren't leading on it Could you really, quickly, for the listeners, just explain in a sentence or two what it was?

15:33Well, the Copyright Directive was really, to put it in really basic terms, British copyright hasn't changed much since 1988. So not for the internet, certainly not for streaming. It changed a bit in the late 90s, 2001, for downloads. So everything that is governing streaming is actually the law that was created for downloads, which is a thing called the making available right which is a basically the way the music was licensed to go through communication was called communication to the public it had all of these rights for musicians to get uh performing musicians got paid money as well as the the rights holders but because labels wanted to sell music through communication systems they needed to carve out a bit so they could exclusively sell through through because downloads of course were just a sale here yeah point to point so making available and was that to stop things like someone selling a ringtone of your song without your permission yeah so they needed so they needed to maintain their exclusive right to sell down a communication channel but british law just said communication to the public yeah so they needed that carve out but then when you get to streaming it's when it It gets really wonky because obviously streaming is not a sale.

16:59Yeah. And it's a lot more like rental and all of these things. But British law, the sort of vagueness in it has allowed them to continue using the law as it stands in order to pretend that it's really a sale, which it's not. Yeah. I mean, and all we were trying to do is go, let's define what streaming is in the law and give everybody their rights back. You know, make sure session musicians get paid from streaming, which if streaming, as it stands, if streaming replaces radio completely, which it almost certainly will, performing musicians will lose their PPL money which they get. Because to make sense, when you record a song, when it's played on the radio it's a performance of the song so you've recorded the performance and there's a royalty to the people performing that's how it's oversimplified a bit just to take you through the history of it very quickly basically if you think about it when they started making records record companies went well my record's being played in a cafe now so if they play my record in a cafe I want them to pay me a license because that's a public performance of our music that we own.

18:18And they won that fight in their 30s, right? But then musicians went, wait a minute. If they're playing your records in public and you're getting paid, they don't need us to play live in those places. So we need some money, thanks very much. And it took till the 90s. I mean, it was agreed here and there, but it took till the 90s to get formally adopted that musicians got a share of that public performance income, which was a replacement of their live performance, if you saw what I mean. It's called equitable remuneration, which is this funny French term, but it basically means their performance is happening when they're not there, so they get a bit of money for it.

19:05And in streaming, there isn't a sale. It's being passively pushed out. how is that not just the same as radio yeah it is radio and that was the big argument that you were trying to get the government to put into law some definitions so that then you can start to go well okay we should as songwriters and performers we should be getting paid just like the record companies are well no not just like that's too oversimplification we were just saying a small portion of the money even a tiny portion of it should be being paid to us in this way No, you carry on with your big licensing rights. We don't want to destroy your business.

19:46You still need to invest in new music. You still need all of that, right? But what you don't need is all of the money, right? That was the argument. The record companies would like to have portrayed us as us saying, no, we should get half of it. It's not at all. That was never said. And whereabouts is that now? Like the parliament was, what was it called when you closed parliament? and you have a new government, like, was it the dissolution of parliament? Dissolution of parliament. Before it went through, which meant, and then Kevin went to the House of Lords, didn't he? No, they basically read out that bill.

20:23Yeah. And we're not going to do this. The Tories just read it out, which means it just got killed. But they did agree to create a thing called the Crater Remuneration Working Group, which was a sort of, what governments do when they want to put something into the long grass. In the meantime, time yeah um i'd help put together a letter to boris johnson with like everybody on it kate bush kate bush paul mccartney it was stupid that letter was stupid which is amazing to think that those artists are just they're not just advocating for themselves they're advocating collectively for musicians aren't they and it's like i think that's and those are the things that like you've just explained rattled through like committees and all those kinds of things like finding an MP that gets behind it.

21:11Like all of that stuff is just going into the cogs and the machinations of Parliament. But I think when you've got Kate Bush and Paul McCartney, Kate Bush doesn't do very much. She does very few interviews. I don't think I've seen her sign very many letters. And I think the only other thing I've seen her sign in recent years is the AI letter that went out, which was, was it a thousand artists on a silent album? Could you talk a little bit about lessons from the Spotify project, the broken record project and how that's dovetailing into the kind of action the more slightly more urgent feeling action around AI because it's new and it's not as defined AI is really unhelpful in so many ways but not least because you know labour came in very sort of pro tech which you know I would have profoundly advised against on a sort of oversimplistic belief that that's where growth is where external investment is going to come from because that's where all the money is that's left, right?

22:22And I understand that logic. There is a grain of truth in that. Yeah, they're going to build data centers in three ports. But the problem was that that pitched them so hard against the major rights holders who were furious that their work had been stolen that there was that that government was incentivized to not continue doing anything difficult for the major rights holders yeah so that's the reality and so you know things that i'd been pushing forward and things that kevin had been pushing forward and you know several others fell a bit by the wayside because it was, you know, the way that everything had sort of been achieved up to then was under the threat of legislation.

23:15Like, if we can't agree something, we'll legislate. If we can't get this right, we'll legislate. That suddenly disappeared off the table because, you know. There's only so much bandwidth and there's something else we need to legislate on. Yeah, and also that particular iteration of number 10 was just far too open to stakeholder noise. Yeah. Like really badly. I mean, I found it quite odd that within the first few weeks of Keir Starmer's government, Daniel Ek was, Arsenal fan Daniel Ek popped into the Arsenal fan Keir Starmer to talk about Spotify. And like, and I didn't see, like I'm sure the MU and other people must have.

23:54Look, in the meantime, I'd run for Labour as a candidate in like one of the most unwinnable seats in the country on purpose because I wanted to carry on the argument. And, you know, as I say, I've stayed in the Labour movement my entire life. I still think the Labour Party, you know, a lot of people would disagree with me. I still think the Labour Party has been the greatest vehicle for progress this country's ever seen. And if you can get it right, it could be again. I think the, you know, So it's very hard to, in the position they're in, in order to maintain focus and maintain what they're about and who they're for.

24:38And yeah, it got, it was just giddy. Yeah. And a bit silly. And I actually, you know, I don't, to this day, I don't really understand why. If we are for working people, then we are for working people. Yeah. And if we're not, we're not. And Daniel, like, I'm not sure if he is. No. So it's, it's, it's. I mean, I don't think you put your money into AI war drones if your priority is people. I mean, I couldn't possibly come back. But I think if we, at the time of recording, it's mid-June and the AI, like, is it consultancy? What's it called? Basically, there's been like a year-long government research.

25:16What's the right word I'm looking for? Consultation. Consultation into AI. And there's still no sign of when it's going to be debated. We're about to go into summer recess. so I'm pretty confident by the time this episode comes out it's not going to have been put back on the agenda. Well, you know, if in doubt do nothing, right? But this is the problem. In the meantime, they've managed to make themselves look like they're for nobody or they're too much for somebody.

25:43And it's really not, you know, it's not been good. Yeah. And I think they'd be the first to admit that it's not been good. I was at a sort of Mia Culper meeting in government with like just before last summer with Peter Kyle and Lisa Nandy and this huge table. And going off that way, it was all like meta and anthropic and all of that lot. And going off the other way, it was like, you know, Disney and Universal and, you know, News International. So it's like the copyright gang and the tech gang. And then me sat in the middle. and one of the first things and I watched Peter Carstall walk all the way around the table I was like oh here we go he walked all the way around the room he put his hand on my shoulder and went Tom I think I'm going to ask you to speak first What on earth are you saying?

26:42Well exactly right and this meeting had been called like 24 hours before Oh wow These are the general councils of like global companies and me I was like it might have been nice to know that you're going to do that but okay and was it about AI? because they were like they admitted the essentially said the original consultation was deeply flawed because it had a position that they wanted which was like basically Google's position and you're like well that's not nobody, we're all obviously upset about this but you know my thing is that neither side in this should win right there's the government should be on the side of working people in this and work and the workers who are the songwriters the producers literally just like our community and our culture and figuring out if they if that's the guiding light they will get this way more right than they think yeah because all of those companies are going to stay in the game no matter what and they're not going anywhere and they're certainly not leaving this economy.

27:53Right? So, I understand the pressures that are on there. And also generating music can't be that important to their businesses. No, no, but it's not that. It's just the principle. It's, it's, it's, we're big. We've got all the money in the world. We will fight you in court. Yeah. And we will win because we've got more money than you. And that's why governments aren't getting involved because they think it's just going to all get fought out in the courts. But of course, how? Well, it's like, It's not even a fair fight, is it? Well, it is and it isn't. And of course, the way that America is set up at the moment is going to make things more complicated.

28:29And that's the other leg of this, isn't it? Because we can't really reprimand global companies when they are literally like in and out of the White House on a daily basis. Well, we try not to. But, you know, I really do believe that, you know, you can. that governments need to assert the power of the state again in a profound way isn't that one of the reasons we Brexited so we'd have more power well you would have thought and also you know it's just the reason why the United States developed antitrust law at the beginning part of the 20th century alongside the welfare state that's you know the new deal and all that We're getting into the, this could be a 10-part podcast.

29:18No, no, I know, I know. But like the reason why they developed it is because it was hurting people. Because it wasn't hurting consumers. There's this misstep, in my view, in economics in the 1970s, the Chicago School, where they decide the monopoly should be allowed to exist if consumers are unaffected. So basically, if the price doesn't go up, a monopoly should be allowed to exist. But of course, that doesn't take into account that a monopoly that controls the truth is now the truth. A monopoly that controls your water supply is now your water supply. A monopoly, it's silly.

30:03This episode of the Drowning Sound podcast is presented in partnership with Cobus, the platform that pays artists four times more than the industry standard, that has high quality audio, that has human curation, which as a human curator is something that I truly value over the kind of algo slop that you get on some platforms. You can really hear the difference. I know lots of places talk about the audio qualities and as soon as I moved across it sort of felt like I was rediscovering music, which is one of the platform's slogans. If you're worried about your playlists you can use sound is it's a really good tool that's part of the sign up process when you join cobuzz it just transfers everything across if you'd like a free trial of this platform that's independently owned and made for music enthusiasts head to drownedinsound.org forward slash playlists where you can hear not only our playlists but get a free trial you can also find these details in the show notes to this episode and now back to this episode of the drowndinsound podcast brought you in partnership with Cobuzz.

31:18Going back to the like, creativity is about parameters and boundaries. And like, when you've got a monopoly, things stop being creative, they just start being extractive. And we're looking at a world right now where we're seeing the kind of collapse of the numbers of organizations into these few companies and we're seeing like from articles in the new statesman about women getting angrier and more left-wing yeah through to the drumbeat of a decade ago aoc wore a dress about tax tax the rich which at the time seemed quite edgy now that seems pretty tame compared to a lot of discourse online and i think that like I often use the metaphor the Icarus moment when Icarus flew too close to the sun burned his wings and fell like there's a moment where we've seen the big tech like as your band broke we saw like the first dot com bubble come and come and go like we are with AI it feels like they now just they have to keep going they can't be that creative because they are in a monopoly like even the AI platforms The comparisons between them are pretty marginal.