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

Spotify paid Joe Rogan over $200 million for his podcast. Then, in 2024, they did it again. Tom Gray has spent the last five years thinking about what that kind of money could do for songwriters instead and his answer at the end of this episode is fascinating. In this week's episode, DiS founder Sean Adams is back with Tom Gray for the second part of a two-part conversation. Part 1 was about the music and the person. This one is about the fight: where the #BrokenRecord campaign came from, how it works, what it has won, and where it keeps hitting walls. Tom Gray is a Mercury Prize-winning songwriter and founding member of Gomez. Since 2020 he has been the founder of the Broken Record campaign, which began as a Twitter thread during the first lockdown and grew into one of the most significant efforts to change how songwriters and performing artists are paid in the streaming era. He has been Chair of The Ivors Academy since 2022 and stood as a Labour candidate for Brighton Pavilion in the 2024 general election. The episode opens with the origin of Broken Record: a tweet, a discovery that UK music copyright law was last substantially reformed in 1988, and the realisation that performing artists have no right to the equitable remuneration that has applied to radio play since the 1930s, because streaming platforms treat a stream as a sale rather than a broadcast. Tom explains how the (Kevin) Brennan Bill came together, including the ten-minute phone call in which it was named, and why the word "remuneration" nearly derailed the whole thing. From there it goes into Labour's relationship with tech, Daniel Ek's visit to Downing Street, the AI consultation process that Tom describes as a failure, and what it feels like to run for Parliament when you have spent four years arguing with the government about copyright law. The metadata problem gets a sharp section of its own: no regulation currently requires streaming platforms to record songwriter information at the point of upload, which creates conditions for fraud and erases the attribution chain entirely. And there is a significant exchange on Spotify's AI remixing feature, Nick Clegg's position at Meta, and what Tom calls "the copyright gang" and "the tech gang" operating in direct opposition inside Whitehall. The episode also gets into the EU Copyright Directive and why the UK failed to implement it, the CMA's 2022 music streaming market study, and what Chicago School economics has to do with how governments think about music monopolies. But the last twenty minutes are about hope. The per diem proposal for songwriters has gained real traction. Tom's belief that one difficult conversation a day, with whoever is in front of you, is more useful than waiting for systemic change. And the case for cautious optimism from someone who has been fighting this for five years and can see things starting to move. The Drowned in Sound podcast is presented in partnership with Qobuz, the pioneering high-quality music streaming and download platform for music enthusiasts and audiophiles. Each week we curate playlists on Qobuz, featuring our favourite records, artists, and the themes we explore on the show. Visit https://drownedinsound.org/playlists/ to discover new music in rich Hi-Res lossless quality and start your 30-day free trial of Qobuz at https://qobuz.com/dis. Edited by: tell.studio (Phil, Louisa, Owen, Matt) Visit: The Ivors Academy Read: Tom's original Broken Record Twitter thread (April 2020) Read: The (Kevin) Brennan Bill (Parliament.uk) Read: CMA Music and Streaming Market Study, November 2022 Recorded at The Shure Experience Centre, London. Sign up to the DiS newsletter: http://drownedinsound.org