Artists have been leveling their complaints against Spotify and similar services for years, but few have enough clout to remove themselves from the world of streaming music entirely. After all, some money is better than no money, right? Not for Taylor Swift. This week, she became the latest artist to publicly denounce Spotify and remove all of her albums from the service.
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Swift has been vocal about her feelings regarding music streaming for quite some time, but her latest actions speak much louder than words. Spotify responded almost immediately with the following statement:
“We hope she’ll change her mind and join us in building a new music economy that works for everyone. We believe fans should be able to listen to music wherever and whenever they want, and that artists have an absolute right to be paid for their work and protected from piracy. That’s why we pay nearly 70% of our revenue back to the music community.”
If anything, Swift is more adamant than before that these services do more harm than good. In a recent interview with Yahoo Music, she discussed in further detail what made her finally pulling the plug on Spotify:
“[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. 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.”
After selling over a million copies of her new album, 1989, in a single week, it seems that Taylor Swift has proved her point. There is still money to be made in the music industry outside of streaming… if you happen to be one of the most popular artists in the world.
