Thom Yorke Pulls Songs From Spotify

Damon Winter/The New York Times Thom Yorke performing with Radiohead in 2012.

Thom Yorke of Radiohead has become the latest major artist to remove his music from Spotify over complaints that the service pays too little in royalties to musicians.

Mr. Yorke and Nigel Godrich, Radiohead’s longtime producer and a member of Mr. Yorke’s side project Atoms for Peace, announced in a flurry of Twitter messages on Sunday that they had withdrawn some of their albums from Spotify, which offers streaming music free and by paid subscription.

“Make no mistake,” Mr. Yorke wrote, “new artists you discover on #Spotify will no get paid. Meanwhile shareholders will shortly being rolling in it.”

Mr. Godrich called Spotify’s business model “an equation that doesn’t work,” and in another message he added: “Someone gotta say something. It’s bad for new music.”

In fact, plenty of people in the music industry have been saying something how companies like Spotify, YouTube and Pandora are changing the way artists and record companies get paid. Most of these services pay a fraction of a penny each time a song is played, which â€" even in the aggregate of millions of streams â€" can be much lower than what artists would make from the sale of a CD or even a download.

The Black Keys have frequently criticized Spotify’s royalties model, and the group’s most recent album, “El Camino,” is still not available on the service, a year and a half after it was released. Some labels and artists, believing that an album’s availability on Spotify will limit download sales, have experimented with “windowing”: delaying an album’s availability for streaming by a number of weeks or months after its release on other formats.

Other artists, meanwhile, have embraced the format. Metallica, after taking control of its recordings from the Warner Music Group, announced last year that it had struck a deal with Spotify, and last month Pink Floyd also announced that it had added its catalog to the service.

The decision announced by Mr. Yorke and Mr. Godrich appeared to affect only Atoms for Peace’s recent album, “Amok,” along with Mr. Yorke’s 2006 solo album, “The Eraser.” Mr. Godrich tweeted that he was also withdrawing music by his band Ultraísta, but on Monday morning that band’s self-titled album was available. Most of Radiohead’s catalog â€" the bulk of it is controlled by EMI, its former record company â€" was still available.

Spotify executives have long argued that their service does not cannibalize other sales, and released a statement in response to the comments by Mr. Yorke and Mr. Godrich: “Spotify’s goal is to grow a service which people love, ultimately want to pay for, and which will provide the financial support to the music industry necessary to invest in new talent and music. We want to help artists connect with their fans, find new audiences, grow their fan base and make a living from the music we all love.”

The company added that it has already “paid $500 million to rights-holders so far and by the end of 2013 this number will reach $1 billion.”

According to Spotify’s most recently disclosed numbers, the service has 24 million users around the world, a quarter of whom pay monthly subscription rates of about $5 to $10. Last year Spotify raised $100 million of investment that valued the company at more than $3 billion.