Earlier this month, The Spotify Team announced in a post on the company’s blog that Taylor Swift‘s management asked for the removal of the singer’s entire catalog of music off the streaming service. Last week, in an interview with Yahoo, Taylor Swift explained her decision, saying she doesn’t agree “with perpetuation that music has no value and should be free.” 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 writers, producers, artists and creators of the music”, she added.
While agreeing that “it’s important to be a part of the progress”, Taylor Swift worries that, in the process, this will take the word “music” out of the music industry. “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”, Taylor continued.
Taylor Swift’s statement caused Spotify’s CEO, Daniel Ek, to express his frustration in another blog post. While he agreed that “music is art, art has real value, and artists deserve to be paid for it”, he denied that Spotify is making money on the backs of artists. “We’re paying an enormous amount of money to labels and publishers for distribution to artists and songwriters, and significantly more than any other streaming service […]. Here’s the overwhelming, undeniable, inescapable bottom line: the vast majority of music listening is unpaid. If we want to drive people to pay for music, we have to compete with free to get their attention is the first place”, he added.
“Here’s the thing I really want artists to understand: our interests are totally aligned with yours. Even if you don’t believe that’sour goal, look at our business. Our whole business is to maximize the value of your music. […]. We use music to get people to pay for music. The more we grow, the more we’ll pay you”, Ek concluded. Both Taylor Swift and Spotify seem to make good points, don’t they?