Taylor Swift pulled her entire catalouge off of Spotify earlier in the week, did any of you see that? I wouldn't have thought anything of it, but Spotify's thirsty response- and appended playlist entitled "Poetry for Taylor Swift"- suddenly made the whole thing a little more interesting to me. Regardez:
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.
Source: Spotify
There has been speculations as to why the Queen of the faeries rescinded her magical incantations off of the streaming service- survey says: money!!- and today Taylor basically confirmed this to be the case (though she said it in a nicer way):
[M]usic 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. 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...Source:Yahoo
I try to stay really open-minded about things, because I do think it's important to be a part of progress. But I think it's really still up for debate whether this is actual progress, or whether this is taking the word "music" out of the music industry. Also, a lot of people were suggesting to me that I try putting new music on Spotify with "Shake It Off," and so I was open-minded about it. I thought, "I will try this; I'll see how it feels." It didn't feel right to me. I felt like I was saying to my fans, "If you create music someday, if you create a painting someday, someone can just walk into a museum, take it off the wall, rip off a corner off it, and it's theirs now and they don't have to pay for it.
That's us orks told!
As much as I enjoy Spotify, I'd actually find it quite fitting (and amusing) if everyone pulled their music. After all, if artists aren't being fairly compensated, then there's a level of exploitation going on- and we all know exploitation is BAD! Sure, in la la land music shouldn't be about the spondoolies, but if someone else is making bank off of your art, you best be getting a piece of that pie. And if that pie doesn't feel big enough, or a worthy trade for your product, then lob it back and keep on walking.
Tay, I'm with you on this one!
Thoughts?
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