Five time Grammy Award winning artist Taylor Swift takes a stand.

"Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. It's my opinion that music should not be free."(Swift 2014)

November of 2014 Taylor Swift announced that her music would no longer be streaming on Spotify, saying she does not think that the service appropriately compensates or values her work as an artist (Engel 2014).  By pulling her music off the popular free music site, Spotify, Swift is rebelling against the music industries compensation practices and sticking up for emerging artists who are being taken advantage of.

Spotify is a free music outlook with millions of tracks to listen too. Taylor Swift thinks that people are not only hearing the music for free but the company is practically playing it to their customers for free as well.  However 500,000 dollars a year may seem like a lot for playing her music, but she disagrees.  Jimmy Buffet states that each time her songs are played she earns less than a penny (Engal 2014).  This is what led her to the withdrawal of her music on the site.  Swift knew her fans did not need to take advantage of her music to hear it. She knew that if she took it off people would still purchase her music. In fact Taylor Swift tweeted reporting on her latest released album 1989 a week after being released saying to her followers, “ Industry experts predicted 1989 would sell 650k first week. You went and bought 1.287 million albums…” (Swift 2014).  She had the faith in her music and knew how talented she was and by pulling her music she took a stand for not only herself but other talented artists as well.  Spotify has different rates for different artists depending on how popular they are and how much demand there is for their music. Therefore Swift being a current, popular and award winning singer and songwriter her pay is a lot more than other small time artists on Spotify.

Taylor Swift sold a shocking amount of albums in the first week it was released. She knew fans would still buy her music and listen to it if they could not listen to it for free on Spotify. But this does not mean that everyone was quite happy with her for pulling this move and there are various opinions about it.  Some argue that she does not need the money from Spotify, and she makes most of her money touring so she is only hurting her fans (Smith 2015).  Another argument is about how the music industry is having difficulty staying alive in the society of streaming.  Mcintyre says that Swift should have left her music there because as more and more people join the streaming technology advance and use Spotify as their only source of music they will begin to purchase the full subscription and Spotify will become more flexible with propositions like the ones given to them by Swift (Mcintyre 2015).  Although these opinions above may be true, what is most important to Taylor Swift is that her work is now being put out to the world at full value to everyone.

Regardless if Taylor Swift has “enough” money or not, she is standing up for others not just her self.  Not allowing her music to play on Spotify highlighted a problem that many other artists both popular and lesser known are having. She is not standing there saying her work is better than the other artists who are played on Spotify, or that she works harder than them. But by doing this, she was trying to prove to herself, to other artists, and to Spotify that all singer and songwriters deserve more credit for their own valuable and rare artworks.

Sources

Engel, Pamela. “Taylor Swift Explains Why She Left Spotify.” Business Insider, November 13, 2014. Accessed October 14, 2015.   http://www.businessinsider.com/taylor-swift-explains-why-she-left-spotify-2014-11

Mcintyre, Hugh. “Taylor Swift Vs. Spotify: Should Artists Be Allowed To Opt Out Of Free Streaming?” Forbes, November 15,2015. http://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2015/08/08/taylor-swift-vs-spotify-should-artists-be-allowed-to-opt-out-of-free-streaming/

Swift, Taylor. “For Taylor Swift, the Future of Music Is a Love Story”. The Wall Street Journal, November 15,2015. http://www.wsj.com/articles/for-taylor-swift-the-future-of-music-is-a-love-story-1404763219

Smith, Dave. “Taylor Swift is wrong about Spotify” Business Insider, November 15, 2015. http://www.businessinsider.com/taylor-swift-is-wrong-about-spotify-2015-5