James Blake is an unlikely candidate for music industry rebel. He is acclaimed for a distinctive style of electronic balladry, full of feeling and fragility. It has won him the Mercury Prize, two Grammys and collaborations with Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar and Frank Ocean. “Sad boy music” was how Pitchfork once caricatured the British singer-songwriter’s sound. “It’s like the opposite of punk, isn’t it?” he said jokingly in 2016 while discussing his influence on other musicians. “I’ve subdued a generation.”
But Blake is not so quiescent after all. Last year, in March, he launched a volley of tweets and Instagram posts lambasting streaming platforms, tech companies and record labels for exploiting musicians. “The brainwashing worked and now people think music is free,” he tweeted during his outburst.
The trigger for Blake’s ire was an Instagram post bemoaning the onus on musicians to make TikTok videos rather than music. “It just made me very angry,” Blake says. “I remember thinking, ‘I cannot believe we’re here.’ Imagine The Smiths or Joy Division making TikToks to promote their music. Think about Nick Cave or Joni Mitchell, and just imagine them negotiating with this bullshit.”
That red-mist moment prompted Blake to dig properly into the workings of the music industry. “It’s when I began to apply the same hyper-focus that led to me making seven albums in 13 years,” he says of this period of self-education. “If we have an issue with the music business, we’ve got to develop a new one.”
I sit opposite him in a recording studio that he rents in Soho, central London. Blake is tall, with a mop of brown hair, modest beard and stylish dark clothing. In contrast to his musical reputation for introspection, he is affable and articulate. The compact room is lined with synthesisers, speakers, consoles and an upright piano loaned from a nearby Yamaha showroom. A whiteboard bears scrawled details of current projects.
“The myth I’d like to dispel is that creativity is somehow hampered by thinking about business,” he says. “The unfortunate story of the industry is of musicians focusing on music while other people do all the other stuff. Those days are over. The days of just holing away in a studio and never thinking about money — we’re just not living in that time.”
That raises the question: what time are musicians living in? According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, worldwide recorded music revenue rose for the 10th successive year in 2024, reaching $29.6bn. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs forecasts that the global music market, including the live circuit and publishing, will grow from $104.9bn in 2024 to $196.8bn by 2035.
All this suggests an age of bounty. But for many musicians, even prominent ones such as Blake, the opposite is true. Claims of miserly remuneration from streaming are legion. Touring costs have soared during the post-Covid inflation surge. Independent venues and nightclubs are closing. US ticketing and promotion behemoth Live Nation has swallowed up much of the live market like a vast corporate python. Blake mentions a “very, very, very well-known” artist to whom he regularly speaks, “who told me that they’d been touring for three years and had lost money”.
Musicians protesting about the music industry is not a new phenomenon. Blake, 36, witnessed it first-hand growing up in the north London suburb of Enfield. His father, James Litherland, is a singer and guitarist who was briefly a member of the progressive rock band Colosseum in the late 1960s before going solo and also working as a session musician. Blake covered his father’s song “Where to Turn” on his 2011 debut album under the title “The Wilhelm Scream”.
“He went independent around the same time as me, aged 35 or so,” Blake says. “I remember him printing up his own CDs, just being: ‘Fuck this, I’m just going to do my own thing, I’m going to make my own album.’ He’s equally as anti-establishment as I am, I think. Or at least I’m anti-corruption. I have an acute sense of justice, and his is strong too.”
Blake acknowledges that there may never have been a golden age for musicians. “I can’t unequivocally say that it’s worse now than it was in the 1970s. There were probably some even more intensively bad record deals being done back then because people weren’t as aware. But at the same time, the overall erosion of confidence in the worth and value of music itself, which we all suffer from, not just monetarily but culturally, is I think the worst it has ever been.”
Until 2023, his records were released by Universal Music, the world’s biggest record label. Blake was signed to one of its many subsidiaries, Polydor. The albums included Overgrown, which won the Mercury Prize in 2013. The most recent, 2023’s Playing Robots into Heaven, spent about half a year in limbo while Blake anxiously waited to learn whether it would be released.
“I remember overhearing that someone at the label had referred to it as an ‘art project’. What they meant by that is: this isn’t going to make us any money. Well, I thought, I’ve never really made you any money. But then I thought about it again, and looked back at the streams, and thought: actually, I have.”
One problem, in his view, is a lack of transparency. In his experience, labels rather than musicians themselves get total figures for streaming revenue. “There’s a degree of opacity that stops you from knowing really what your worth is to them,” he says. “Something I would like to be able to offer in the future is to show musicians what gross looks like versus net, because that’s something we don’t really see.”
Revenue is not opaque with other tech platforms: it is non-existent. In 2020, Blake had a TikTok viral hit with his piano version of “Godspeed”, which he originally co-produced for Frank Ocean’s 2016 album Blonde. He has earned nothing from the song’s use in 161,000 other videos. “It just showed me what the crux of the business model of that situation is, which is that our art is free. It’s wallpaper for other kinds of expression.”
Today’s musician, in his view, must adapt. No longer signed to Universal, he is currently putting records out with Good Boy Records, an independent label that he found on an online music distribution service called Indiefy, a Mexican start-up. “I signed the deal in the back of a taxi,” he says. “It’s about eight lines long. I understood it and I trusted the people I was signing to because I had met all of them.”
Currently touring a stripped-back solo piano show, he is determined to avoid the ticketing and venue stranglehold exerted by Live Nation. “I think the answer is direct-to-fan ticket sales and independent venues,” he says. “When I’ve done gigs like that, I’ve found the profit margins were a lot higher because I’m not soaking up a lot of fees. Neither are the fans: I can actually lower the ticket price.”
He rues the publishing deal that he signed with Pulse Music Group in 2019. The publisher’s role in music is to manage copyrights and promote the use of songs in film, television and so on. The deal enabled him to buy a house. “I signed something, but I should have thought about it. At the time I just needed the money.” Now he finds himself “in this seemingly endless recoupment” of paying back his deal.
“I do want to express my gratitude for the countless people who made it possible for my records to be sold around the world,” he says. But he believes that companies with salaried employees and multiple artists on their books are less likely to work for your success than a handpicked team on commission. “I think what we’re witnessing is a groundswell of independent thinking, people taking things into their own hands,” he avers. “They don’t need the sense of stability that large companies have often represented, because those companies are not offering that anymore.” Using Notes.fm, an app that identifies unpaid royalties, he has discovered that a quarter of the songs he has ever released were not registered properly, meaning that he had not collected any royalties on them.
Being an agitator does not come naturally to him. He credits his long-term romantic partner Jameela Jamil, an activist as well as a TV presenter and actor, with helping him conquer his fear of confrontation. One of his first public clashes was with Pitchfork over the “sad boy music” label, which he felt stigmatised men for expressing emotional vulnerability. He struggled with his mental health early in his career.
“I can put some of my existential anxiety in the past, some of my depression, down to a lack of feeling in control over my life,” he says. “I entrusted everything outside of the music to somebody else, or to multiple other people, and didn’t investigate it myself. And that was my mistake. Why I speak about this stuff now is that I want young artists starting out not to make the same mistakes I made and to empower themselves from the start.”
As the numerous scribbles on the whiteboard in his studio attest, he has remained productive amid all the upheaval and burnt bridges. “The biggest plus isn’t just financial independence and stability, it’s creative engagement and freedom,” he says. “There are songs that feel like gifts to me, that were given to me in a moment of emotional clarity because I felt free. And I haven’t felt that for many years. The most creatively excited and engaged that I’ve ever felt is this year, and it just happens to be the year that I took things into my hands.”
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