No Björk Vulnicura On Spotify… Does It Even Matter?

Björk has joined Taylor Swift and Thom York camp, she has removed her new album ‘Vulnicura’ from Spotify, or may be it has never been there…

‘We’re all making it up as it goes, to be honest. I would like to say there’s some master plan going on [with the album release], but there isn’t,’ she explained to Fast Company. ‘But a few months ago I emailed my manager and said, ‘Guess what? This streaming thing just does not feel right. I don’t know why, but it just seems insane’. To work on something for two or three years and then just, ‘Oh, here it is for free.’ It’s not about the money; it’s about respect, you know? Respect for the craft and the amount of work you put into it.’

It’s funny how a veteran like her admits ‘to make it up as it goes’… doesn’t she have years of experience in the business? It’s true that the business has changed a lot and now artists get paid pennies for millions of streams, so I can understand the decisions of artists of her caliber. As she says, it is not even for the money, but for the respect of art…so why aren’t all artists doing it? Why aren’t all artists pulling their stuff from Spotify? I wonder whether it is even realistic?

But Björk is not totally opposed to the streaming service, as a matter of fact her older albums are still on Spotify, I have checked, and she has even an idea about the problem, based on Netflix:

‘But maybe Netflix is a good model. You go first to the cinema and after a while it will come on Netflix,’ she said. ‘Maybe that’s the way to go with streaming. It’s first physical and then maybe you can stream it later.’

Yes, except that you pay to see the movie but you never own it! What will people do with their CDs and MP3s once they can stream the songs on Spotify? And how long will we have to wait to get the music on Spotify? One or two months? A year?

It’s too late to stop the process, people are used to stream music and it’s very easy to download new albums for free, most of the new generation doesn’t see it as stealing. Bjork herself was a victim of this exact problem and still doesn’t get it? Why didn’t she attempt anything when her album was freely streaming on this Mexican blog 2 months before its official release? Because artists are powerless in front of piracy, currently you can listen to ‘Vulnicura’ on several YouTube accounts and I guess it is pointless to shut them down because another one will soon reappear. So Spotify or not, you can listen to ‘Vulnicura’ for free anyway