On November 3rd, Taylor Swift stunned fans by pulling all of her music from Spotify without any warning or reason. Spotify has said that this has never been done before, at least not without warning.
Up until a few days ago, there were many rumors as to why Swift pulled her music. A lot of people said that she did it because she was making a statement saying, “all music has a price” and that by having her music on Spotify, she would not be getting properly paid for her work. Others have stated that the decision came from her record label because they believed that they were not getting the money they deserved from using a streaming company like Spotify. The common factor between these two is that money was a reason behind the sudden incident.
On November 8th, Swift’s record label President, Scott Borchetta, stated that Swift’s decision to remove her music from Spotify was a “big fist in the air” and that other artists would be sure to follow her lead. Borchetta said on a radio interview that the reason behind Swift’s music pull was because they did not want to embarrass the fans. He said that if a fan wanted to buy a physical copy or from iTunes, they could be disrespected because a friend could say “why would you pay for that when it’s free on Spotify?”
Borchetta went on to talk about how Spotify was a good player and service but they needed to change their ways. He said, “Music has never been free. It always cost something and it’s time to make a stand and this is the time to do it.”
Taylor Swift also commented, saying that Spotify was an experimental idea and that she is not comfortable to contribute her life’s work to an experiment that she does not feel fairly compensate the people that make the music. She also said that she does not want to add to the idea that music is free and has no value.
For those of you who don’t know, Spotify is not an illegal music service like LimeWire. The Swedish company pays hundreds of millions of dollars for the songs from all the major record labels, including Universal Music, which distributes Swift’s songs and the rest of the music that comes from Big Machine. Spotify also pays more in royalties than iTunes, to artists.
Swift is very popular on Spotify as 25% of Spotify listeners have streamed her songs and her songs were on 20 million playlists. This loss of Swift’s music comes as a shock to Spotify since something like this has never happened before. There are certain artists, like Beyoncé for instance who have held an album but no one has taken all of their music off from Spotify before.
As more and more information comes out about this situation, people have been debating on whether Spotify or Swift is at fault over this debacle. There are many articles that explain both sides and give their opinion on the matter. Do you believe Swift made the wrong decision or that Spotify does not treat artists fairly?