The group was formed in California 2008, uniting Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ Flea, Becks’ Joey Waronker and producer Nigel Godrich. As is the way with most star spangled projects, many people will have envisioned something quite different to the almost cerebral, trip-hoppy melodies and timbres. The sound is not unlike latter day Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’, just a little more sterile.

The name indicates something beyond the music, the microscopic examination of universal love and tranquillity, a notion that is reflected in their bleepy muses. Thus it seems fitting that Yorke and Godrich spoke out last week against stingy royalty payments from the free-music-phenomenon Spotify. Yorke protested that “new artists get paid fuck all with this model” with Godrich corroborating “Meanwhile small labels and new artists can’t even keep their lights on. It’s just not right.” Atom’s for peace took swift action against the company, removing all music from their database. After all, with Spotify handing out 0.4p for a play, 1 million streams would only generate a measly £3,400. At what point does easy access and good exposure become a negative?

Interestingly, the digital music service ‘Soundhalo’, pioneered by Mercury winners Alt-J, will be utilised by the band for their London shows. This device allows fans to view high-quality mp4s of the performance for a price of 99p/song, instead of the “million shaky, horrible sounding YouTube videos already online… the next day” (Godrich). There is potential that the app’s unprecedented usage in this context is a reaction, almost a sneering gibe, to the “facile mudslinging” (Yorke) and the attempted inhibition of any debate.

We shall see how this confrontation resolves, whether it absorbs or repels the issue, until then it’s likely that Atoms For Peace will continue playing and maybe even seek out alternative mediums to share their music.

Speaking to Music Week, Molko stated that he felt the people behind Spotify were ‘just interested in making money at the expense of others. It comes from a place of just pure profit-making on their part’, and called attention to the ‘negligible’ profits that artists received from the service.

Earlier this month Radiohead’s Thom Yorke removed his solo music, and the works of his side-project Atoms for Peace, from Spotify, stating on Twitter; ‘Make no mistake, new artists you discover on Spotify will not get paid, meanwhile, shareholders will be rolling in it’. Last year, Black Keys member Patrick Carney said that the service was not fair to new artists.

The service, launched in Stockholm in 2006, currently has over 24 million subscribers, a quarter of whom pay a monthly fee for additional features. It has been touted as a legal and fair alternative to digital piracy, but has come under fire for supposedly failing to adequately compensate the musicians whose work is streamed on the service – a 2010 infographic estimated that a solo artist would need over four million plays a month just to earn minimum wage.

Counterarguments by Spotify state that the majority of their revenue is spent on royalties, and that it is the responsibility of the record companies to ensure their artists were fairly paid.