In an interview with Trick Trick for The Fly Zone Radio Show, Scarface expressed his distaste for streaming platforms and how little they pay artists.
Around the 15-minute mark of the interview, the 53-year-old rapper suggested that hip-hop is being “dumbed down” in the age of streaming, which is partly to blame. “It seems like the whole culture is being dumbed down now, and I want to be as offensive as I possibly fucking can when I say this, again… The culture is being so fucking dumbed down and manipulated and controlled by people that don’t look like us,” he said. “So these motherfuckers don’t look like me, they’re not creators of this culture, but they want to control it and dictate who come in, how they come out, the stream… We don’t fucking stream, man, we buy records, we ride this shit around in our car.”
He said these same people he’s accused of taking control of hip-hop, also want to “alienate” those who made it in the first place. “We can’t sell a $10 record no more, we got to sell an under-a-penny stream, you tell me where the dick is and how we duck this dick,” he continued. “We getting fucked. … Ain’t no money in the streams for us, but it’s money in subscriptions for them.”
He also questioned how people could be getting tens of millions of streams, but only see a fraction of the money that streaming platforms make from subscriptions. Asked what artists could do, regardless of what genre of music they were making, he said he had an idea. “Pull that shit off them fucking platforms, and don’t allow them to stream your shit for free,” he said. “You fucked a whole lot of people when you fucked over the mom and pops. You fucked them. You knocked them people out of jobs. Ain’t no records being sold no more.”
Scarface said that he doesn’t want to be getting about $3,000 or $4,000 for, say, 35-65 million streams. “If I sell 65 million albums, then I ain’t got to make no more fucking albums,” he said. “If I sell 65 million fucking singles at a dollar, then why am I rapping? I ain’t got to do it no more. … You’re not finna prostitute me. And I wish that they would stop letting them prostitute my fucking people, bruh.”
Last month, the Recording Industry Association of America announced that music streams compromised 84 percent of total recorded music revenue in the United States last year. That’s a total of $14.4 billion, with 96.8 million people paying for subscriptions to services such as Apple Music, Spotify, and Tidal in the U.S. alone.
The small payout from streaming success has been a hot topic for a few years now, with even major artists such as Ye, formerly know as Kanye West, and James Blake blasting the services for essentially ripping off the artists who keep them in business.
