Well, now, when you’ve just sold 1.3M copies of your latest album there seems to be little reason to use a streaming service to connect to your audience and Taylor Swift has just stuck it to Spotify in a big big way. She has removed all her music!!!
According to Time Magazine:
“Taylor Swift has decided to remove her music from Spotify, the company announced in a pleading blog post Monday. The only song of hers remaining on the service is ‘Safe & Sound,’ from The Hunger Games soundtrack.
“We hope she’ll change her mind and join us in building a new music economy that works for everyone,” Spotify posted, noting that 16 million of its users have played Taylor Swift music in the last 30 days and that she appears on 19 million playlists.
Swift refused to allow her 2012 album, Red, on Spotify when it first debuted, but it later appeared for Spotify users to enjoy. Her most recent release, 1989 never appeared on Spotify. The artist has also been vocal about her thoughts on music sharing.
“Piracy, file sharing and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically, and every artist has handled this blow differently,” Swift wrote in a Wall Street Journal earlier this year. “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. I hope they don’t underestimate themselves or undervalue their art.”
Here is Spotify begging her to return:
“We love Taylor Swift, and our more than 40 million users love her even more – nearly 16 million of them have played her songs in the last 30 days, and she’s on over 19 million playlists.
We hope she’ll change her mind and join us in building a new music economy that works for everyone. We believe fans should be able to listen to music wherever and whenever they want, and that artists have an absolute right to be paid for their work and protected from piracy. That’s why we pay nearly 70% of our revenue back to the music community.
PS – Taylor, we were both young when we first saw you, but now there’s more than 40 million of us who want you to stay, stay, stay. It’s a love story, baby, just say, Yes.”
The truth is nobody else could do it and now it is done, will there be a floodgate.? I don’t know, do many people sell a million copies in their first week.
It doesn’t really matter to me, I own all her stuff any way and if I didn’t and I felt like doing so it would take me two seconds to find it all on some piracy download website, the same one I got the early 1989 release.
I really don’t blame her, her mindblowing numbers make Spotify, all streaming services (I assume everybody else was taken down as well), an irrelevance.
Mean, Taylor has just announced her world tour 2015 and we cget nothing but one lousy show at Metlife in July. I am shocked there is no MSG or Barclay gig in May to start stuff off.
Wow, Taylor Grinch is in full swing…
ps: Thanks JJ McCabe for the alert
