Taylor Swift Explains Breakup With Spotify
When Taylor Swift decided to pull her new album from Spotify, the streaming music service responded with the sort of shameless "take me back" campaign not seen since Robin Thicke named an album after his ex-wife.
But Taylor isn't having it, and she has some pretty valid reasons. In an interview with Yahoo, Taylor stood by her decision to pull her music from the streaming service.
"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," she said. "And I’m not wiling 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," she continued. "A lot of people were suggesting to me that I try putting new music on Spotify with 'Shake It Off,' and so I was open-minded about it. I thought, ‘I will try this; I’ll see how it feels.’ It didn’t feel right to me. 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.’ I didn’t like the perception that it was putting forth. And so I decided to change the way I was doing things."
So there you have it. While it might be disappointing not to have her music on the service, there's a certain discrepancy in how artists are compensated for having their work on Spotify. Bette Midler lashed out against Spotify and Pandora for making it difficult for songwriters to earn a proper living, and Steven Tyler expressed his disapproval with the deteriorating state of copyright law earlier this year at National Music Publishers Association's "Celebration of the American Songwriter" event. As Taylor says, it would be one thing if it were just her that was getting shafted on pay, but there are other people who actually do depend on the royalties from these songs for their livelihood, people who perhaps aren't as inexhaustibly wealthy as she is.
So basically, Taylor and Spotify are never, ever, ev---eh, you get the rest.
Via: Yahoo! Music
Credit: AP