Joe Elliott doesn't like streaming services

Streaming services, amirite? They're like the work of a demon. A minor demon, perhaps, but a demon nevertheless. Tell us why, Joe:

"I signed up for the Apple one, Beats. It's kind of semi-evil, because whoever owns Spotify is worth more than 50 times than Mick Jagger, who's been in this business for 50 years. And that's just not right.

Mick Jagger, according to The Richest, is worth 360 Million Dollars. So to be worth fifty times that, you would have to be an eighteen-fold billionaire. 18 billion is roughly the GDP of Honduras.

Just to be clear: Daniel Ek is not Honduras. In fact, according to Time, he's worth 300 Million Dollars, which puts him behind Mick Jagger in terms of wealth.

Obviously, the point Joe was trying to make was that it seems absurd that a person who works in the tech industry is worth a lot of money compared with someone who works in the music industry for fifty years.

Although that doesn't make sense generally: it's not like the tech industry away from music is known for being a place where the bosses take home tiny pay packets.

It also doesn't make any sense in this specific case. First of all, it could be possible that Mick Jagger had just invested incredibly badly, or had been generous with his money.

Secondly, although Mick has been in the industry fifty years, Ek's not exactly a newcomer - he started when he was 14, so nearly twenty years, and he made a fortune selling his first advertising business. So it's not like he's built his money up entirely from not making Mick Jagger even richer.

Also: both these people have obscene amounts of money. Even if Daniel Ek was fifty times richer than Jagger, that would mean Jagger had six million dollars. You can buy a bionic man with that.

But you had a point, Joe, to make:

Because when you read stories about Lady Gaga getting 127 dollars for 60 trillion plays, or whatever, you're thinking, this is bullshit.

Well, yes, there were stories five years ago that GaGag got USD127 for a million streams - it's funny that Elliott was spot-on with the amount there, when so many of his other figures are grossly overestimated in favour of his argument, but then I think we all know people in our own jobs who do that.

But why was GaGa doing so poorly out of streaming? Not because of the semi-evil streaming services, but because of the fully evil record labels:

[In] some explosive comments made by Gaga's ex-manager Troy Carter. Carter states that Gaga's label, Universal Music, cheated the artist out of streaming royalties due to her from Spotify and other streaming services during the height of her pop popularity.

Carter, who is no longer handling Gaga's career but is active as a music and technology entrepreneur and investor, said, "We've always gotten screwed from record royalties ... So when you look at it, the live business and the merchandise business have always been the bigger piece of the pie. And with record labels, I think it's more of just chickens coming home to roost. Well, let's rephrase that: labels made a significant amount of money off of Spotify that didn't match up to the artist royalty statements ..."

How evil of Spotify to, erm, not be party to the main point where artists are getting ripped off.

Anything else, Joe? Do you perhaps have an "I can remember when it was all trees round here" argument to offer?

And when you get on Spotify, it's very insular. Which the whole industry has become. Everybody is on headphones now. It's just Zombieland, and we're all guilty of it. I do it too, but only when it's necessary, like on an airplane.

Yes. People listening to music on headphones. In the old days, people used to go to their bedrooms to be insular and listen to music. How can Spotify have ruined that by, erm, inventing headphones or something or... what?

The clash of metals

This, then, would be two bald men fighting over a comb, were it not for one of the men being Bret Michaels: A spat has broken out between Posion and Def Leppard over which band is realer or something.

Joe Elliott started it by suggesting that Def Leppard had more "substance" to their music, and that Poison just coasted by on their image.

We've heard Pour Some Sugar On Me and seen pictures of Poison. Neither the substance of one nor the style of the other would detain people writing cultural histories of mankind for very long, we'd suggest, but Michaels wasn't taking such a slight on the chin. Pausing only to wash his hair, he embarked on an interview with a radio programme, and talked at some length. Some great length. The first he heard of the scurrilous claims were at a backstage press conference at Sweden Rocks:

All of a sudden, one guy goes, 'We have a video of Joe Elliott last night saying that MÖTLEY CRÜE and POISON and all these bands have no talent, they can't play.' Now, let me just put this on the record: I'm a DEF LEPPARD fan. Not 'kind of a fan' — like, I own the CDs; I own the albums. We used to do the song 'Wasted', if that gives you any indication. I used to play 'On Through The Night' with like… The song 'Wasted' was one of our favorite songs…. I'm a DEF LEPPARD fan. Old-school, new-school — it doesn't matter. Gone to see their shows, liked the guys. Joe Elliott, I don't really know, but he seems like a decent guy, whatever. I get in there and the guy says it to me. I say, 'You're lying. I don't think Joe would say that.' He's like, 'No, I've got it on video.' Which they had on video — him [Joe] stating this.

Goodness. First Kate Moss, then Max Moseley, now Joe Elliott. Is nobody safe from the secret videoing?

Bret started out by trying to be conciliatory, but then he changed his mind (and, yes, he is giving a stream-of-consciousness interview about a press conference he once gave, like a footballer talking through a goal):

And then it hits me that, listen, I've been nothing but cool. And I go, 'Well, this is coming from a guy who lip-synched on 'Dancing With The Stars'.' I go, 'This guy lip-synched…' Mutt Lange writes their… you know, does their albums… I'm not dissing them, I'm just saying…

Remember, snorting 'they mime on mainstream dancing programmes and someone else writes their songs' is not, in any way, to be considered a 'dissing'.

In other words, I was like, 'Look, give me and Joe a guitar each and a pen and a piece of paper, stick us in a room for an hour [and see who'll come out] with a couple of songs. But I don't wanna fight Joe.

I suspect that they'd probably both come out with a couple of songs, as everything these bands have done for the last decade or so has the taint of having been knocked up in thirty minutes as some sort of dare.

Bret, though, isn't dissing anybody. Oh no:

Isn't he secure enough in his success or where he's at… If someone said, 'Hey, what do you think about MÖTLEY?' Even though we've had words — MÖTLEY and us, or supposedly, whatever — I'm like, 'Hey, I like MÖTLEY's music. I'm a fan. They have good rock songs.' I just feel uncomfortable in my skin.'"

I love that he can't quite remember if he has had a falling-out with the Crue or not, or if people just said he has, or, indeed, "whatever".

The radio programme asked a direct question: did Rikki Rocket challenge Joe Elliott to a fight? Bret gave an equally direct response:

"That I didn't see. What I thought was going on was that they were like… What the joke was from a lot of fans was, like, 'Don't trip over a water backstage at a DEF LEPPARD concert, you might unplug the stereo.' And I said, 'With our band, we don't ever use…' There's nothing. That's what blows everyone's minds. You go to a lot of 'concerts,' and you can trip over anything we've got, we play everything. In other words, the keyboard player… We have one guy extra to sing some of the parts, but that's it. There's no… You can put us in a club… Like we did it in New York. We went and played for, I believe it was WPLJ, and they stuck us in this club and played, and it was one of the best nights we'd had, 'cause you can put us there or in the stadium or an arena, and it's gonna sound the same; there's no fear. And that's what some of the joke… I think Rikki's challenge was the same as mine. If this is gonna become a songwriting duel, Rikki goes, 'Do you bring Mutt Lange, or do you bring the band?'"

- Did he say he'd fight him?
- We might have had someone sing some extra vocals live once
That's that cleared up, then.

I imagine this falling-out will continue for the next ten years, by which time it will be a full three decades since anyone outside the bands gave a toss about what either thought.

Joe Elliott feels for the young people

Joe Elliott reckons the kids get a tough break these days, what with the way the industry is:

"Contracts nowadays, record labels, what's left of 'em, are trying to actually get parts of a band's merchandise when they tour. It's like, how dare you! It's two separate things! You know, I just can't see Roger Waters willingly giving up 20 percent of his T-shirts. Luckily we aren't in that kind of bag. I just feel bad for the new bands. I mean, there's the odd artist that can sell records these days. But most people, if they don't have a second record make profit, they don't make a third record."

Yes. Of course, it doesn't help that a lot of the room for bright young things is clogged up with relics that even Car Booty would find hard to discover any value in, like, ooh, Def Leppard, say.