AceShowbiz -

The idea of free music just doesn't sit well with The Black Keys' drummer Patrick Carney. The outspoken musician recently had an interview with The Seattle Times and took the opportunity to voice his opinion about U2's decision to release their latest album "Songs of Innocence" for free on iTunes last month.

Carney said that the Irish rockers "devalued their music completely" by letting millions of iTunes users listen to their music without paying at all. He also said the stunt "sends a huge mixed message to bands... that are just struggling to get by. I think that they were thinking it's super generous of them to do something like that."

In the interview, Carney also shared some words for streaming services like Spotify. He said, "My whole thing about music is: if somebody's making money then the artist should be getting a fair cut of it. The owner of Spotify is worth something like 3 billion dollars... he's richer than Paul McCartney and he's 30 and he's never written a song."

Carney isn't the only one who has commented on U2's new album in the past few days. In an interview with Sarah Montague, Ed Sheeran said, "I think you should offer things for free when it feels right but if you don't put value on your music, no one else is."

"For instance, the new U2 album, I still haven't heard. I know it's there but there just wasn't any urgency for me to grab it. With music, I think people will appreciate it more once they've bought it because they paid for it," he added.

U2 has angered numerous people with their latest studio effort. In a Facebook Q&A session earlier this week, Bono finally apologized after an iTunes user complained about receiving the album.

"Oops. I'm sorry about that. I had this beautiful idea and we got carried away with ourselves. Artists are prone to that kind of thing," the band's frontman said. "Drop of megalomania, touch of generosity, dash of self-promotion, and deep fear that these songs that we poured our life into over the last few years mightn't be heard. There's a lot of noise out there. I guess we got a little noisy ourselves to get through it."