Taylor Swift has a reason for pulling all of her music from Spotify, which she believes devalues her work.
Swift’s entire catalog disappeared on Spotify over the weekend and her new album, 1989, was never made available at the popular streaming service. While some had speculated that it may have had to do with changes within her record label, Big Machine Records, she said in a new interview that it is over money.
While speaking with Yahoo Music, she was asked about her decision. She referenced her famous Wall Street Journal op-ed from July, in which she wrote, “Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for.”
“If I had streamed the new album, it's impossible to try to speculate what would have happened. But all I can say is that music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment,” Swift explained this week to Yahoo. “And I'm not willing to contribute my life's work to an experiment that I don't feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music. And I just don't agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free.”
Swift said that she had put “Shake It Off” on Spotify and didn’t like the way that felt.
“I felt like I was saying to my fans, ‘If you create music someday, if you create a painting someday, someone can just walk into a museum, take it off the wall, rip off a corner off it, and it's theirs now and they don't have to pay for it,’” she said.
Of course, it’s a bit strange for Swift to take such a hard line against Spotify specifically. After all, you can listen to “Shake It Off” whenever you want for free on YouTube. In addition, Spotify has been very open about how it pays artists, with 70 percent of its revenue going back to the rights holders for tracks. Users also pay $9.99 a month for the premium service.
Swift isn’t losing fans, though. 19899> sold an astonishing 1.287 million copies last week and will probably score a second week at No. 1 on the Billboard chart.
image courtesy of Roger Wong/INFphoto.com