Taylor Swift says Spotify doesn't pay artists fairly

Taylor Swift says Spotify doesn't pay artists fairly ,

Taylor Swift has already sold more than 1.287 million copies of 1989. But the pop star says "it's impossible to try to speculate" if her latest release would've reached the same, instant (and increasingly rare) success if it'd been available to stream on Spotify. In the first interview since Swift abruptly pulled her entire discography from the streaming service, she underlined a familiar theme: Spotify isn't paying musicians — and others involved in an album's production — enough money. "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," Swift told Yahoo. "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."

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"I thought, 'I will try this. I'll see how it feels.' It didn't feel right to me."

"And I just don't agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free. I wrote an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal this summer that basically portrayed my views on this," said Swift. "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."

Swift claims she was willing to give Spotify a fair shake; the singer let fans stream 1989's lead single, "Shake It Off" — albeit an entire month after the track had already made its debut on iTunes. But apparently that was the last straw. "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."

But then Swift goes off the rails a bit with a tangent that sounds like something Lars Ulrich would've said during Napster's heyday. She told Yahoo:

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." I didn't like the perception that it was putting forth. And so I decided to change the way I was doing things.

Spotify has over 10 million paying subscribers, so there are plenty of people paying to look at those "paintings." Now more than ever, it seems Swift's problem with Spotify is tied directly to the company's free, ad-sponsored tier. Her music remains available from Beats Music, Rdio, and Google Play All Access. Those services require a subscription for anything beyond playing artist radio stations, where you're never in control of exactly what song you hear. Spotify, by contrast, gives users on-demand access to any track in its expansive catalog.

Since Swift's disappearance, the company has held steady to the belief that it's doing good things for artists and the industry at large. "We hope she’ll change her mind and join us in building a new music economy that works for everyone," Spotify said in a statement after Swift walked away from the service. "That’s why we pay nearly 70 percent of our revenue back to the music community." Even as she pushed through a hectic whirlwind of publicity for 1989, it seems Taylor Swift remained keenly aware of just how much of those revenues were going back to her camp. And clearly it wasn't enough.