Black Eyed Peas star Will.i.am says he fears for the future of the music industry because “mad tech” makes it harder for artists to make money.
Speaking at a Cannes Lions panel hosted by The & Partnership’s chairman and chief executive Johnny Hornby, artist and entrepreneur Will.i.am said, “Music will always be music. Whether or not there is an industry is questionable. I don’t really know how we make money moving forward because of the tsunami called mad tech — there was mad men and now there’s mad tech, it transforms everything.”
Amid a debate by artists about how they earn money from streaming services, and Taylor Swift’s strong stance against Apple for offering free music for three months, Will.i.am said of the “tech tsunami”: “It toppled our industry to the point of, how do we make money?”
He continued, “People still listen to music more than they ever have before, but we have no hardware of our own.”
But he admits that “the real rock star is the guy from Snapchat [Evan Spiegel], rock stars are people that bring people together…Yeah, we could fill up a stadium, but that guy aggregates so many eyeballs.”