There are plenty of music fans out there who love Spotify. And what’s not to love? Online and offline streaming of all your favourite artists at a reasonable price — who could take issue with that? Well as it turns out, the artists themselves could.
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The latest high profile musician to withdraw all their music from the service is teen-turned-young-adult-sensation Taylor Swift. In doing so, Swift joins the likes of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, who called the streaming platform unfair to artists.
If The Verge is to be believed however, Swift’s reasons for pulling her music may be a little more prosaic.
Indeed, it suggests that Swift withdrawing her music may have more to do with trying to boost physical sales of her new album 1989 than any real issue she might have with Spotify.
For its part, Spotify seems rather keen to get Swift back. That makes sense, given that nearly 16-million of the service’s 40-million users have listened to one of her songs in the last 30 days.
“We hope she’ll change her mind and join us in building a new music economy that works for everyone,” Spotify writes in a blog post. “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”.
That shows exactly the kind of clout Swift has. And the fact that pulling her music will likely provide a boost to her album sales shows exactly why Spotify is so desperate to get her back.
As long as music rights holders continue to get between US$0.006 and US$0.0084 per play on Spotify though, it looks like Swift’s people have the advantage and will probably keep her music off the platform until sales start to wane again.
