Spotify has lost Taylor Swift whole collection of music for unknown reasons. There are rumors that this is a dispute between Spotify and Taylor over the amount that artist get paid per song play, while other have said this is a marketing move to sell her 1989 album which is set to break sales records. Either way this ruthless move from Taylor has caused quite a stir on the internet, and prompting Spotify to beg for her back.
We <3 @taylorswift13 but she asked us to pull her music off Spotify. 40MM of us say “Stay Stay Stay.” http://t.co/lOGMo4qTB7#justsayyes
— Spotify (@Spotify) November 3, 2014
“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,” Spotify said in a statement Monday. “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 [rightsholders].”
Spotify pays “between $0.006 and $0.0084” per stream, but when your streaming millions of song plays a day the money quickly adds up for artist like Taylor.
“Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for,” Taylor said earlier this year to The Wall Street Journal. “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.”
While this is a setback for Spotify, the company may win in the end because the massive amount of Taylor fans want to listen to her music and subscribe to the service. Now this could also set off a trend of more artist removing their music from the service as Taylor did.
Tell us what you think about Taylor Swift removing her music from Spotify in the comments below.