Damn, when Mumford & Sons is dissing you hardcore you know shit just got real. Which is exactly what happened when Mumford & Sons sat down with The Daily Beast to talk about Jay Z’s new music streaming service Tidal.
To Mumford & Sons, the very mention of Tidal is greeted by a series of loud fart sounds. And no, they were not asked by Mr. Z to join Team Tidal.
“We wouldn’t have joined it anyway, even if they had asked. We don’t want to be tribal,” says frontman Marcus Mumford. “I think smaller bands should get paid more for it, too. Bigger bands have other ways of making money, so I don’t think you can complain. A band of our size shouldn’t be complaining. And when they say it’s artist-owned, it’s owned by those rich, wealthy artists.”
Mumford & Sons also threw some major shade at Taylor Swift for the anti-Spotify op-ed she wrote for the Wall Street Journal awhile back.
Mumford & Sons guitarist Winston Marshall also has harsh words for Tidal, calling the A-list artists who participated in the aforementioned ceremony “new school fucking plutocrats.”
“We don’t want to be part of some Tidal ‘streaming revolution’ nor do we want to be Taylor Swift and be anti-it,” Marshall says. “I don’t understand her argument, either. The focus is slightly missed. Music is changing. It’s fucking changing. This is how people are going to listen to music now—streaming. So diversify as a band. It doesn’t mean selling your songs to adverts. We look at our albums as stand-alone pieces of art, and also as adverts for our live shows.”
Of course they aren’t alone in their anti-Tidal sentiment. As Gawker chronicled last week MANY people aren’t too thrilled with Tidal, both in the site’s mission as well as just the overall user-friendliness of it.
I guess only time will tell if Tidal is a success or not.
So have you given Tidal a try yet? Whose side are you on here? And how long until the Swifties kill them all in their sleep?