Gomez reveal how much they get paid from Spotify

Mercury Music Prize winning Gomez, who famously started out in a Southport garage, have revealed just how much they earn from streaming on Spotify.

Tom Gray was speaking to BBC 5 Live Breakfast about the music industry, which the band have criticised regularly.

Gray started the Broken Record campaign in May to highlight a “double whammy of income destruction” for music artists in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

Gray said: “You may think that a record deal would work like this: ‘Hey, here’s some money,we’ll pay for everything and when we’ve made our money back we’ll start paying you a royalty’ but that’s not how it works.

“What they do is they assign you a little royalty, back in my day it was like 15%, and then they set all of the debt against your 15% so you’re paying back all of the debt that you owe them from your royalty. So they’re profitable maybe 5 or 6 times over before you start making any money.

“And that’s been going on since the 1950’s and no-one has ever done anything about it. This has gone on forever and there’s never been an intervention.”

When asked how much he gets paid when someone streams a Gomez song, Gray replied: “Oh I don’t get paid anything. Universal Music Group get paid.”

“The major labels have had this thing called the Recoupment Deal for years.”

His Broken Record campaign highlights “the low royalties many artists, writers and musicians receive from streaming” and raising money for the PRS Emergency Relief Fund and the Musicians’ Union (MU) Coronavirus Hardship Fund.