Major Labels

UPDATED: Taylor Swift Pulls All Music Off Streaming Music Services, Spotify Responds

image from upload.wikimedia.orgUPDATE 2 – You won't find Taylor Swift's new album on Spotify. In fact, the star and her label Big Machine have pulled all of her music off all on demand streaming music services. Several reports suggest that the reason for the take down is that Big Machine is for sale and the owners felt a hugely successful Swift album would boost the their $200 million asking price.

Whatever the reasons behind the streaming boycott, Swift's new "1989" is on track to have first week sales of 1.25+ million, making it the top selling album debut since 2002 when fans bought 1.32 million copies of "The Eminem Show." That's great news for Taylor and a struggling music industry, but bad news for Spotify and other music streamers. While the exact number is unclear, forcing fans to buy since they can't stream has certainly contributed to Swift's impressive debut.

Today Spotify responded:

Spotify logo"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 wrote in an open post.  "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."

"PS – Taylor, we were both young when we first saw you, but now there’s more than 40 million of us who want you to stay, stay, stay," Spotify concluded. "It’s a love story, baby, just say, Yes."

 

 

Share on:

8 Comments

  1. “We believe fans should be able to listen to music wherever and whenever they want” — this is a weak argument on Spotify’s part. You can just as easily listen to music “wherever and whenever” if you buy it outright, as MP3s or ripped from CDs.

  2. I hope this is a trend that we will see more of. I don’t understand why music has to be a service that fans can just have for free without giving back to these artists that bring them such joy.

  3. ah, there’s the rub….her company is for sale. i kind of thought an ulterior motive was behind all of this removing her stuff from spotify business….correct me if i’m wrong here. if her label is for sale and a potential buyer can clearly see the amount of streams she is “really getting” as opposed to what they are being told by the label she’s getting that would weigh heavily on the selling price of the company, would it not?….if her material is not on spotify at all, who can question her numbers? maybe ms. swift is not quite the sales dynamo they would like us to believe?

  4. spotify is just the latest in an endless historical lineage of people and organizations ripping off and screwing musicians. from what i have heard, most of the royalties due to artists aren’t even collected unless you have a serious publishing company constantly checking everyone all the time. what else is new in the recording industry–from ripping off and screwing the black musicians of the early twentieth century, to record labels using payola to sell records and shady contracts to keep artists beholden in the late twentieth century, then the the advent of the internet and napster and complete loss of respect for artists, to today’s wonderful scam of streaming organizations. There will always be a few musicians who get really rich, and a whole bunch of talented artists struggling their whole lives. this is nothing new. the most successful musical acts are invariably those who have enough talent to enhance their marketing and financial chops.

  5. Same as the computer games industry; this is how it works; distributors in various countries are seriously bent, they pay the master supplier say 70% of real sales and the rest of the pot is split fairly between the execs (published/distributor) This has been going on for ever; how do you get over it; become corrupt/have a good enough product to set up your own publishing company or just steal product. Anyone who listens to the beauty of music and the story really should grow up and realise its about money where we are all corrupt

Comments are closed.