The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Spotify Taylor Swift

'Spotify feels like a grand experiment' Taylor Swift on why she dumped the music streaming service

Author

By John McCarthy, Opinion Editor

November 7, 2014 | 3 min read

Taylor Swift has branded Spotify a "grand experiement" that she does not want to contribute her "life's work to" as she feels the service does not substantially recompense artists.

Swift hopes 1989 can shift over one million copies worldwide

Swift pulled her music from the site earlier this week following a very public pay dispute, depriving users of her new album '1989'.

She told Yahoo: “If I had streamed the new album, it's impossible to try to speculate what would have happened. But all I can say is that music 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.

She added: “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. And I just don't agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free."

Regarding Spotify’s service, Swift issued the analogy: "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.”

Following Swift’s removal of her content, 1989 has become the best-selling album in the US since the Eminem Show in 2002.

However, despite it coming under fire this week, musician Adele’s manager, Jonathan Dicken’s claimed that Spotify is not the “bad guy” and that the site had to at least be commended for finding a way to monetise the music industry again.

Spotify Taylor Swift

Content created with:

Spotify

Spotify is a music, podcast, and video streaming service that was officially launched on 7 October 2008. It is developed by startup Spotify AB in Stockholm, Sweden....

Find out more

More from Spotify

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +