“My report about the ‘Value of YouTube to the Music Industry’ would be really brief because I can summarize the benefit of YouTube to artists in a word: none,” says Irving Azoff, responding to a controversial U.K. study that has been the subject of much ink since its debut earlier this month. Azoff disputes numerous claims in the paper, prepared for YouTube parent Google by consultancy RBB Economics.

“They say without YouTube, users would look for sites that paid even less for music,” Azoff adds. “I say good luck finding services that benefit so greatly from music and pay so little. Google’s Alphabet has a market cap of $660 billion, and YouTube itself is worth somewhere north of $90 billion—a value it acquired, in large part, on the backs of music artists. But they’d rather spend their money on dishonest studies to justify their measly payments than offer creators what they deserve for the use of their work.”

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