Joe Rogan | The Truth About Streaming w/The Black Keys

Yeah, it's also when someone has a continuous message, it's always the same and it's always positive. It makes me really suspect because I'm like... I love this self-help guy on the Metallica documentary who was offering the lyrics. That's the best movie ever made probably about music. It's like it beats Final Tap. It's like if there was a competition, I have to come down on some kind of monster. It made me actually like... It made me as a fan appreciate those guys in a weird way. Their dysfunction. They became characters. One time I'll watch the movie and I'll be like, oh man Lars is so annoying. Then I'll watch it again. I'll still think Lars is annoying but I still think he's right. I have a different view every time I watch it. But ultimately I do... I end up liking those guys because of it more. He stepped out in a big way with that Napster thing. It was an odd moment for everyone because everyone was trying to figure out what is this file sharing thing. How's it gonna... And then the music business, you guys felt it first. You guys were the big hit more than anything because it's not the same to watch a movie on your TV. Even if you can download an illegal movie. I'm sure it'll have a little bit of a hit but people want to go to the fucking movie theater. But with your shit, once people start sharing things, you just get a file. And everybody kind of just assumed that, well, I mean this is like this new frontier and it's not really stealing. You're just copying. It's just you're not giving them money for it. But you're not really stealing. You got this weird sort of... And Lars was the first guy to say, hey fuck you, you're stealing. But it was a weird fight to have because hindsight is always 20-20. You know what the internet has become since then. It's incredibly difficult to try to keep a rap on things and to keep things... To keep someone from downloading things. Like they just get... If you have songs, they get out there. Whereas the Napster thing was the first time this was happening and he was the guy who was this really, really wealthy guy who was a huge success saying, don't do this. Like this is stealing. Well, yeah. It's like David versus the Goliath type of thing. I mean clearly people shouldn't steal. But is it Metallica's job to tell people that? Maybe. But maybe they should have gone directly to Napster or to their record label. But when streaming first started becoming like a real thing, we had a talk with a friend of ours who basically encouraged us to look at it and not do it. And I went into... With our manager when talking to someone at Warner Brothers and said we didn't want to do it. And they were kind of outraged. And like you can't not do it. You can't not do it. And I didn't really know at the time but I found out a couple months later that they... I found out a couple months later because I was quoted in Rolling Stone talking shit about Sean Parker and Spotify. And what happened is I ended up getting a phone call or email from Daniel Ek, the owner of Spotify. And we had lunch together. And he's a fucking cool guy. He's a nice guy, very intelligent. And I really saw his side of it for the first time. And he basically without explaining it directly was like, you know, that he's paying our label to get our music. What they do with the money he can't control. And you start realizing at that moment I realized, oh yeah, there's some stock being floated to these companies. Which there was billions of dollars of stock was sent. And the label has no obligation to give you money out of the stream? They gave us a couple hundred thousand dollars of it out of the billion. Because they paid it to us in the way the label does. They paid it as an artist royalty and they took all these deductions off of it. And it was a made up number. There's a lot of money in the music industry right now. And the problem is that it's like, not like, okay, some of my favorite bands for the most part don't have hit songs. They don't get played on K-Rock. They don't have like a Macarena type shit on their, that's going to be coming their way. You know what I mean? And that's what pays money is like, because they treat almost every stream the same. It's like, there's a different, there's a royalty rate for if you pay for Spotify. And there's a royalty rate for if you're listening on the free service. What they need to do, in my opinion, is they need to say, this guy, they say Joe listens to music. He has good taste in music. He, he, he, he follows 500 bands, which means that there's no possible way that he's going to be listening to all 500 of those bands in a, in a, even a six month period of time. But when he does choose to listen to a song, it's worth like X, like 10 X versus this person who's listening to Old Town Road a thousand times a day. You know what I mean? You know what I mean? Because Joe is like actually engaging with our thing and not just streaming the song for free and like a monkey, like, you know, like a Pavlov, you know, whatever. Mouth salivating every time they hear the little, little, little Old Town Road, wherever. I listen, I look at my Spotify thing and I'll go months. And I have all, I pay for all of them. I have like YouTube, Apple, whatever. I don't have title, but that's because they didn't, they, they gave ownership to like 12 artists and they're like, fuck you. What the fuck is that? Just keep the ownership and pay a higher role to you fucking cocksuckers. You know what I mean? Honestly. So I'm like, so anyway, I look at my Spotify, I listen to like, I listen to like a hundred songs a month. It's barely anything. And I'm like, the way to really do this, it's fair, is you take my 10 fucking dollars, right? And listen to a hundred songs. That's it. Because I've got so many ways to listen to music that you listen, you take that 10 songs and you give everybody 10 cents. But that's not the way they do it. They're like, we pay 0.000567 cents per stream. How could you fucking know what you pay for stream if you're, if you're a distribution service? Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah. I'm giving you $10 and you're going to take 30% off the top, like Apple music used to do when you would buy a CD. And then you take seven bucks and throw it towards the artists. That would make sense to me. But they don't. They're like, they're paying, they're keeping all this fucking cash or they're keeping it in a pile. And then at the end of the day, they're just satiating like, you know, Rihanna's hundred million dollar check she gets every year. You know what I mean? But I know a lot of artists who just, they get checks for like $2 and 50 cents for a whole year on a record that normally would sell like five or 6,000 copies. But there's no need, like you have to basically be an idiot to buy a CD nowadays, you know, because it's a digital file that you ultimately could download from Spotify under your phone and have it with you forever. Yeah. You know, unless you don't have the internet, you know, if you're in Alaska or North Dakota, maybe you need to have a CD. So, so few people are printing CDs, then it boils down to how much of an infrastructure do you need as an artist? Who do how many people do you need to be representing you? What? How does your stuff get out there? Doesn't it? Does it get I mean, especially with you guys, doesn't it just get out there because I mean, I've just found out about you guys because somebody tweeted it. I got my oh, who are these guys? I'm not worried about us, man. It's like the new bands coming out. The new bands trying to break it. That's what I'm worried about. Yeah. It's like, we're fine. But it bums me out. But I mean, for anybody in the business, how much of an infrastructure do you need in this digital time? Well, you just need someone to figure out how to get it to people. I think I think in a way, it's like when we first started our first record deal was with a small label not far from where we are here. And the deal was this. Give us 12 songs. Pay for the recording yourself. We'll master it, which is the final process of making a record that costs a couple hundred bucks. And we'll send you 50 albums and we'll give you like 12 percent of the money we make. That was it. And oh, and we're going to have a $500 marketing budget. That was that was that was the deal. You know, I mean, so we basically I mean, we made this record, paid for it ourselves. And we went on tour with this agent named Ralph Carrera, booked us a tour, like kind of a mercenary agent who would like book a book. The label, I think, paid him a couple hundred bucks to book us his tour. And it all kind of started steamrolling. You know what I mean? But we had no infrastructure. We had no management. We had no agent. We had nothing. We just kind of got in advance, started going. And I think in a lot of ways, nothing has changed except for that when we got to the second level, you know, the set. Like it there was a couple thousand dollars there for us to make a record. There was opening slots that, you know, touring was a little bit different than. But I think we've always kind of done it in a way that was pretty DIY. And the way it's the same way it has to function now. The only difference is there's fewer record labels that are going to sit there and give you $15,000 to make a record and maybe give you 10 grand to help you buy a van. And that's the hardest step. That's the threshold where things, bands are having a hard time getting through, you know. Once you get through there, then it's like, then you get to where we were for years, which is you're on a bigger label, you're making records and no one's paying attention to you. The only reason why we ended up getting attention paid to us, I think, by Warner Brothers was for our six record brothers. It was kind of a heavy time. I just turned 30, Dan just turned 30. And you know, when you turn 30, it feels like you've gotten old, you know what I mean? And like, especially in the rock and roll business. And we had this good, this record, I thought was great. And I went into, went to talk to Lee Orkon with our manager. Lee Orkon was one of the guys, heads of Warner Brothers. And I was like, we're like, we're the most synced band on Warner Brothers, which is when you get a song on a TV show or a movie or a commercial. There's no other band for the last two years that has had as many syncs as we've had. But we've never, I don't even know who works the radio department at Warner Brothers. And we've been on your label for like four or five years. And Lee Orkon basically was like, fuck. He prioritized us like that week. And for the first time was like, we're going to work on your band. And when that happened, that's when the wallop loses shit. That's when radio, K-Rock, everything fucking changed. You know what I mean? It took us six albums and it took us all those syncs, all that shit, all getting called sellouts all the time for a while. For Gavin, our song is calling you. The same dudes that were at our first shows with their arms crossed. Sellouts a funny one. You still do the same music, stupid. It's the same music. It's different, but it's crazy. I think that for this type of thing, it comes from that idea that maybe, oh, that band, I liked it better when it was my secret, my friends and my secret. For sure. I don't want to share it with this dude. That's why it's dangerous to have your song in certain things. If your song comes on in Walgreens, you better watch out, man. That's a red flag. We've had opportunities to have our songs sent to Top 40 radio. There was this thing where if we won Record of the Year for Lonely Boy, Warner Brothers was going to service that song to Top 40. It would have never probably been a hit, but if we would have won that Grammy, it could have fucked our whole band up. I've seen it happen with lots of bands. It's just like you become like playschool level. Do you really think that you guys would change? No, dude. We wouldn't have changed, but the thing is, you start accessing like... You start acquiring a fan base that's more fickle and maybe more annoying. It's like, okay, I bet you as a Cubs fan, like a Chicago Cubs fan in 2017 was like, fuck this World Series shit. Every motherfucker wearing a fucking Cubs hat. Do you know what I'm saying? Yes. And I know exactly what that would feel like. It's probably the same thing. It's like someone's going in there to get like... Someone's going to get shaving cream and this band that used to play it like the fucking Cas Ball in San Diego is playing it while they're checking out. Like they're probably like, fuck this. Fuck this. Listen, if you guys put out the same music that you put out in that time period, it wouldn't have mattered. Your music is... it's you guys, you know? I mean, it's not... even though you've gone experimental and you've done different styles of songs and some of them feel more bluesy, some of them feel more... It's like it's still Black Keys. If you guys just did that, it wouldn't matter what you're on. Nobody gives a shit.