The stats of a recent poll by UK Music speak for themselves. Yes, they obviously would publish a poll with these kind of stats – but I suspect the results came back even better than they first anticipated.

57% of respondents said they turned to music over the past year to help pass the time during various and differing levels of lockdowns to slow down the spread of Covid-19. Only 14% disagreed with the statement, and it’s a mystery what on earth the remaining 29% said. Perhaps they were too busy listening to music to respond to the survey?

The public obviously cares about music. The artists who make the music care about it. The labels who sell it almost unequivocally care about it. And yet, the higher up the scale you go, the larger the indifference grows – until you get to Spotify, who do not care about music at all.

If they cared about music, not only would they pay one penny per stream, but they’d be openly boasting about it. Instead, Spotify and the streaming industry refuse to reveal how much they pay and use unbelievably complicated algorithms to make it next to impossible to dissect.

And it’s not just those in the underground. A report in Britain’s Sunday Mirror over the weekend reveals this same situation applies at the higher end of the tree as well. And they lay the blame entirely at Spotify’s door.

They’d be right. Daniel Ek and the bigwigs at Spotify couldn’t care less about music. Ek has made clear his view that music is basically a product which should be pushed out like in a factory. And last year, he invested €1billion of his own money during a tough period for a largely closed music industry – in deeptech companies…

Yet he’s worth billions, money he’s made out of music which he cares little about – whilst artists out there cannot make enough money to live on. And he wonders why the likes of Pete Townshend once described him as “a f***ing crook”…