Eagles star Don Henley isn’t Google’s biggest fan, it’s fair to say. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times to promote the band’s current tour, he lays into the internet giant, and the wider culture of what he terms ‘techno-utopians’ for their attitude towards music and musicians. “In the technocratic world of Google (which owns YouTube), my musical brethren and I are no longer artists; we’re not creators — we are merely ‘content providers’. Copyright and intellectual property mean nothing to the technocracy,” said Henley. “They’ve built multi-billion-dollar, global empires on the backs of creative, working people who are uncompensated. They’re wrecking entire industries. The genie is so far out of the bottle that there’s really no putting it back in. There might be a legislative fix, but there seems to be no political will.” Yes, since you ask, the Eagles back-catalogue is available on Google Play. But Henley’s views are forthright. “They spread the money and the propaganda around like manna, employing their favorite buzz words like ‘innovation’. Regulation, they say, will ‘stifle innovation’, and the legislators all nod in agreement. It’s an oligarchy, plain and simple…”
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