Dave Grohl wants you to know that he doesn’t “fucking care” if you use Spotify to listen to the Foo Fighters‘ new album, Sonic Highways — or any of his music, for that matter — as long as you “listen to the fucking song”.
Speaking to Digital Spy, Grohl weighed in on the debate surrounding Taylor Swift’s recent decision to pull all her material from Spotify, the Shake It Off singer refusing to be part of what she calls an experiment which doesn’t pay artists fairly.
“Me personally? I don’t fucking care. That’s just me, because I’m playing two nights at Wembley next summer,” Grohl recently told Digital Spy.
“I want people to hear our music, I don’t care if you pay $1 or fucking $20 for it, just listen to the fucking song. But I can understand how other people would object to that.”
Grohl says the best way to get people interested in your music is to make it available by whatever means necessary, and by bringing a focus back to live performance.
“You want people to fucking listen to your music? Give them your music. And then go play a show. They like hearing your music? They’ll go see a show. To me it’s that simple, and I think it used to work that way.”
“When we were young and in really noisy, crappy punk rock bands there was no career opportunity and we loved doing it and people loved fucking watching it and the delivery was completely face to face personal.
“That’s what got people really excited about shitt. Nowadays there’s so much focus on technology that it doesn’t really matter.”
Grohl’s newly expressed sentiments may come as little surprise to fans. The 45-year-old has avidly trashed the Internet in the past, alongside programs like The Voice and X-Factor, saying they strip away the DYI ethic of rock and are more concerned with the product, rather than the music.
In an interview with Sky Magazine last year, which has since gone viral, the former Nirvana sticks man let loose.
“Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument — learning to do your craft — that’s the most important thing!” he told Sky. “It’s not about what goes on in a computer!”
“It’s destroying the next generation of musicians! Musicians should go to a yard sale and buy an old fucking drum set and get in their garage and just suck. And get their friends to come in and they’ll suck, too.
“And then they’ll f******* start playing and they’ll have the best time they’ve ever had in their lives and then all of a sudden they’ll become Nirvana. Because that’s exactly what happened with Nirvana. Just a bunch of guys that had some s***** old instruments and they got together and started playing some noisy-a** s***, and they became the biggest band in the world.
“That can happen again! You don’t need a f****** computer or the Internet or The Voice or American Idol.”
You heard him Foo fans. Go forth and listen to the Foo Fighters however you see fit. Just make sure you fucking pay attention and fucking learn the words for when the Foo Fighters tour Australia in 2015.
The Foos’ eighth studio album, Sonic Highways, is out now.
