Spotify had as much fun as it could with the controversy at first, writing her a pun-filled public note and promoting a playlist called “What to Play While Taylor’s Away,” so it’s mildly interesting that they’ve refrained from gloating about today’s victory. I thought, ‘I will try this I'll see how it feels.’ It didn't feel right to me.” And I just don't agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free. 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. “ll 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’s 1989 was conspicuously missing from Spotify when it was released in October 2014, and Swift yanked the rest of her catalogue a month later.ĭays later, she explained the decision saying: November 2014: Streaming is “an experiment” Nothing she says will ever apply evenly to the people who might really suffer. She, and other top artists, stand to make millions of dollars from streaming no matter what happens, and Spotify and Apple Music even push them further ahead of the crowd by way of recommendation algorithms, featured playlists, and paid exclusives. Streaming is making the music industry more unequal But the biggest flaw in Taylor Swift’s argument? She’s Taylor Swift. Album sales, digital and physical, were already plummeting by the time Swift offered up these thoughts, and many of her young fans were more likely to listen to her music on YouTube, paying for the experience with auto-play ads, than they were to have gone to a Target and laid down their $14.99. There is no such thing as “rare” when you’re talking about content that’s distributed primarily via the internet. More importantly, that music takes its value from being “rare,” and for another, that the concept of a concrete “price point” for an album was still one that made any sense.
The thrust of this argument takes a few things for granted that weren’t true, even in 2014: For one, that Swift could use her personal situation as a standard by which to gauge the industry’s dealings with artists. It's my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album's price point is." "Music is art, and art is important and rare. In a now-infamous essay for The Wall Street Journal, Swift wrote: July 2014: “Valuable things should be paid for” Though, that doesn’t guarantee that her stance on streaming is logically sound. She’s uniquely positioned to speak authoritatively on this issue as a public-facing brand and a behind-the-scenes creative. She can make hundreds of millions touring as an A-list performer, but it still makes sense that a prodigiously talented young woman who was written off for years on the basis of her diaristic songwriting and frivolous interest in glitter would transition into adult pop stardom in part on a platform of business savvy and semi-empowering rhetoric about the value of her own labor.
That’s a designation she’s proven she cares about. To put Swift into some context I think is often ignored, she’s not just one of the biggest pop stars in the world: She’s also its most successful, prolific, and recognizable contemporary songwriter. What does this mean for taylor swift the moralist?