The Black Keys' Dan Auerbach
The Black Keys withheld their new album from online streaming services as free giveaways are "unfair" on fans who have already paid for the CD.
The duo's latest release El Camino was a noticeable absence on several popular sites, including Spotify and Pandora, and drummer Patrick Carney has now explained why they decided not to allow it to be played on the web.
He tells VH1: "We decided for this album to not allow music services to stream the entire album. It's becoming more popular, but it still isn't at a point where you're able to replace royalties from record sales with royalties from streams. It felt unfair to people who purchased our album to allow people to go on a website and stream the album for free whenever they want it.
"For a band that makes a living selling music, it's not at a point yet to be feasible for us. Maybe in a couple of years we'll allow that album to be streamed, but there's a lot of stuff about these services that people don't really know. It's kind of set up to be a little bit more fair to the labels than it is for the artists I think, so that's why we made that decision."
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