Amazing Sexist Spectacle By Music Industry Insiders and Journalists As Taylor Swift “Windows” Album On Spotify.
By David C. Lowery on TheTrichordist.com
Here’s Taylor Swift a few months back in the Wall Street Journal on music:
Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. 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.
Very eloquent. Clearly she intended (as she has in the past) on “windowing” her album. That is withholding her album from Spotify for a period of time. Just like TV/Movie industry does with Netflix and Hulu.
So Spotify’s response is to treat her like a teenager and make her a mixtape playlist!!!???
Yikes. It is clearly “Bro-land” over at Spotify.
But that’s not the worst of it. Here are the mostly male music industry beat journalists responding to her decision to not release her new album on Spotify. The very fact they say she “pulled” it from Spotify is in itself loaded. It was never on Spotify. They don’t even get this basic fact right.
Look we get the jokes, but it’s doubtful that if a male artist had so clearly stated his feelings in regards to streaming and the value of music those comments would have been left out of the stories. Nor would he have been treated like a teenager.
And below is Joshua Brustein “Mansplaining” that Taylor Swift is wrong when in fact her strategy makes perfect sense.
1) new album not on Spotify = 1.3 million sales.
2) New albums always generates interest in back catalogue.
Therefore also remove back album to generate additional sales.
Why isn’t bloomberg interviewing Swift for demonstrating such business savvy and showing the boys how to play the game?
On the other hand Brustein makes no sense whatsoever.
Hey Joshua you write for Bloomberg a money magazine. This is about the money it’s not a “protest.” Protest.. why the fuck would you assume she’s protesting? Cause she’s a woman and emotional? Something like that? Not thinking rationally? Is that what you are getting at?
And Gawker deserves special mention for being too stupid to notice that Spotify is owned by Billionaires. Oh but they are male! That’s right men can be “rich as fuck” assholes like the SnapChat guy and that’s cool. Darn I always forget how this works!
lol cmon half her songs are about breakups
I’d suggest that the variety of breaking up references were less about Swift’s gender than the fact that most of her music seems aimed at teenagers/young adults in the throes of some sort of spasm of heartbreak/relationship drama. If you make your art about such a subject, it is unreasonable to expect that it won’t become a reference associated with your name.
whoever wrote this article really is a total fool. Jumping on the ‘sexist’ bandwagon has damaged your credibility. Whatever Swift’s reasons were to remove her album from Spotify, you surely cannot expect her not to receive any criticism for it. By the way the decision was made by her LABEL run by a man. I’m fed up of all there amateur activists flexing their muscles and attacking everyone who disagrees with a female as a misogynist or sexist.
Go and campaign for REAL women’s issues like the 200 kidnspped girls in Nigeria. That is where real sexism and oppression is happening against women.
Few points to make here:
1. You’re making an assumption that Spotify is sexist because one of the highest selling artists is treating the music industry like the old fashioned movie company? Sorry, there’s nothing sexist happening there.
2. All these analogies by both male AND female journalists have to do with the fact that Swift is notorious for writing break-up songs. You complain they’re treating her like a high-schooler, but that’s exactly how she portrays herself in her music.
3. You have the music industry backwards. The heads of music industry hate services like Spotify. It’s harder to quantify ‘album sales’ in digital media, so the execs of record labels and performing rights organizations push people to sell physical media and albums more than stream. Because it pays more.
Let’s be frank, the only one blowing this into a sexist debate is the author of this article. The fact this is blown up is a GOOD thing. The record labels and industry execs have been fighting to hold back the industry for years; that’s the real reason they’re failing. The music industry needs to grow progressively with technology, not sit in one place.
Oh one last point – you’ve ignored the hundreds of articles about how ‘Swift is saving the music industry’.
To say that a male dominated industry isn’t going be dominated by masculine metaphors is simply missing the boat. Of course the boys that run the digital companies don’t need some physical selling female relic of the past outshining their new streaming services that make shareholders rich and artist not so much…….
How did this conversation turn into a battle of the sexes based on a stupid headline? The real story here is that Taylor is taking her music off Spotify. Her quote that music is an art form and worth something is not stupid thing to say. Artists want to be compensated for their work. Taylor’s 1989 CD will be the only album that sells a million copies this year. I suppose that her record company want to maximize those sales and not lose them to the crappy royalties that Spotify pay. This is all about money. Recouping the cash lost for doing free concerts for iHeart Media in exchange for hundreds of iHeart Radio stations playing the crap out of her new music.
And then there are all the social media exposure deals (that weren’t free) TV specials, timely endorsement deals, etc etc all put together just so she can massive exposure all at once so you and will go buy her music because she is seemingly the hottest thing ever.
In the end you do all that to sell 1 million or so albums.
It was just 15 years ago when there would be several million selling albums in one day. Now you have to put together the most elaborate battle plan since Desert Storm just to sell some copies.
The point: Almost no one buys music any more.
We like free music. The artists don’t because, well they make so little that they end up working at a hardware store.
I see their point but like you I in fact don’t care because I’m used to getting free music from sources like Spotify,Slacker, etc etc Like you I’m used to getting what I want when I want it.
Owning music? What for? It’s sad actually. But their it is.
This is a clear example of a “journalist” trying to make a story out of nothing by attacking other “journalists”. Gross.
If Justin Bieber had done the same thing he would have gotten it even worse. Stop trying to force a sexist twist into this story.