Bono: Don't blame Spotify - LA Times Last month, Jimmy Buffett asked Spotify founder Daniel Ek for "a raise." Earlier this week, Taylor Swift pulled all her music from the music streaming service. Now, Bono is riding to Spotify's defense. "The real enemy is not between digital downloads or streaming, the real fight is between opacity and transparency," he said Thursday at Web Summit in Dublin, Ireland, the annual technology event attended by 20,000 people this year. "The music business has historically involved itself in quite considerable deceit," Bono said. By opacity, Bono is referring to the smokescreen that artists and rights-holders encounter when they try to determine the royalties they are owed when their works are played or performed. Music industry conduits for those royalties keep information hidden or hard to find. Rights holders don't know if they're being shortchanged or not. Some can afford investigators or lawyers; others simply must live with the amount that appears on the check they get in the mail. Spotify offers a dashboard for musicians, songwriters and others to see where and in what volume their works are being streamed, and how much Spotify is paying out. But those payments typically go through a complex web of global intermediaries. "For a big hit today, there are about 700,000 royalty streams, just for one song," said Willard Ahdritz at the same conference. He is CEO at Kobalt, a record label and music publishing company that also helps rights holders get paid. The issues go beyond transparency. In a prepared statement, Swift said, "It's my opinion that music should not be free" and that "valuable things should be paid for." Her statement was vague and indirect. She didn't address specific issues with Spotify. The Financial Times, citing "a person familiar with the matter," reported that Swift and her record label, Big Machine, take issue with Spotify's two-tier system - there's a free service that limits the number of songs that can be streamed, and an unlimited version for $9.99 a month. The paper said Spotify requires artists to put their works on both; Swift's team argues that the free service reduces Spotify's revenue, and hence the amount of royalties it's able to pay out. Kobalt's Ahdritz said "there needs to a lot of communication, a lot of discussion, to change and to create the future of music."