In the new Hot Press: Beggars mainman Martin Mills on Adele, Spotify & the EMI/Universal merger

“Adele came to us through Jack Peñate,” Mills recalls. “We signed him and he said, ‘I know this girl who’s doing some great stuff’ so we brought her in. There was no manufacturing process.”
Ruminating on the health – or otherwise – of the modern music industry, he slams 2012’s EMI/Universal merger.
“The world as a whole believes monopolies are bad, which is why we have commissions examining them,” Mills states. “They’re even worse when they involve intellectual property. If it’s fizzy drinks it probably doesn’t matter whether it’s Pepsi or Coke but music’s different. Adele is not a substitute for Lady Gaga and The National aren’t a replacement for Arcade Fire.
“It means there’s less for people out on the fringes who are making different, challenging music. That’s bad for culture, bad for the world.”
He also takes issue with Thom Yorke’s assertion that Spotify is “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse.”
“The criticisms of it are unmerited,” he insists. “Spotify do a good job of monetising their customers and they pay a reasonable proportion of what they earn to labels. They’re a genuine piracy alternative.”
Mills does however say that the 50/50 Spotify split the Beggars Group have with artists will have to change.
“We made the decision to split the money while those services were growing into the market,” he explains. “I think we’re the only people doing that. We can’t afford to do that forever, though, and in the relatively near future will have to turn that two-way split into something more akin to a royalty.”
He also criticises labels’ reluctance to engage with Napster during its piracy heyday (“The music industry shot itself in the foot with alarming regularity back then”); missing out on making millions with R.E.M. (“They said that they sent their cassette to two labels – us and I.R.S. – but it definitely didn’t get to me”); the Pixies (“I think we have the great Pixies albums in our catalogue – and probably always will”); the £100,000 of Warners money that saved Beggars’ bacon in the ’70s (“I thought it was a staggeringly large amount of money that they’d never get back”) and celebrity (“You want to do something well and if fame comes as a result of that great, but to want to be famous per se is pretty sick”).
Add in cameos by Gary Numan, Amy Winehouse, Mark E. Smith, The Lurkers, Ivor Biggun, Pierce Turner, U2, Future Islands, Mercury Rev, The xx, Perfume Genius and Gil Scott-Heron, and it adds up to a must-read interview with one of music’s most successful mavericks.