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Billy Bragg accuses Taylor Swift of a 'corporate power play' ditching Spotify for YouTube's Music Key

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By John McCarthy, Opinion Editor

November 18, 2014 | 3 min read

Billy Bragg has entered the music streaming debate, criticising Taylor Swift for feigning her move to YouTube's Music Key streaming service as concern for the value of music as an artform.

Billy Bragg blames YouTube - not piracy - as the threat to sales

The artist and activist was speaking out in response to comments issued by Swift last week that she didn’t believe in giving her "life’s work" away for free on Spotify, a service she called a "grand experiment".

She said: "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."

Bragg pointed out how hypocritical her comment was on the face of her moving to Music Key which also, similarly to Spotify, offers an ad-based free service to listeners.

He said on his Facebook page: "What a shame that Taylor Swift’s principled stand against those who would give her music away for free has turned out to be nothing more than a corporate power play. On pulling her music from Spotify recently, she made a big issue of the fact that the majority of the streaming service’s users listen to her tracks for nothing rather than signing up to the subscription service.

"She should just be honest with her fans and say "Sorry, but Sergey Brin gave me a huge amount of money to be the headline name on the marquee for the launch of YouTube Music Key and so I’ve sold my soul to Google."

He concluded: "If Ms Swift was truly concerned about perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free, she should be removing her material from YouTube, not cosying up to it. The de facto biggest streaming service in the world, with all the content available free, YouTube is the greatest threat to any commercially based streaming service."

As a result of her pulling her music catalogue from Spotify just before the launch of her new album, ‘1989’ shifted over 1.28 million copies worldwide, making her the first artist to breach the million mark in 2014.

Bragg criticised Swift further for, in his mind, trying to justify her “corporate power play to us as some sort of altruistic gesture in solidarity with struggling music makers".

Last week Swift’s label claimed that the artist took in $2m in the last twelve months as a result of streaming on Spotify. This figure would have rocketed had she saw fit to release her new album on the site however.

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