Ever since the dawn of Facebook partner Sean Parker’s now-defunct illegal music sharing service Napster, people have been less obliged to pay for music. Options for legal and illegal music streaming are an inevitable reality, but that doesn’t mean artists have to like it.
On Monday, one week after the release of her fifth album, “1989,” Taylor Swift removed every one of her songs (except for “Safe & Sound” from “The Hunger Games” soundtrack) from Spotify, much to the chagrin of fans everywhere. According to Spotify, 16 million users have listened to Swift’s song in the last 30 days and her music appears on over 19 million playlists.
“We love Taylor Swift, and our more than 40 million users love her even more,” Spotify wrote in a Monday press release. “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 percent of our revenue back to the music community.”
This dramatic move, so typical of Swift’s dramatic nature, came without explanation, but a Wall Street Journal opinion editorial Swift wrote back in July revealed that Swift’s move was likely motivated by a dissatisfaction with the effect streaming has had on album sales.
“There are many (many) people who predict the downfall of music sales and the irrelevancy of the album as an economic entity,” Swift wrote. “I am not one of them. In my opinion, the value of an album is, and will continue to be, based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work, and the financial value that artists (and their labels) place on their music when it goes out into the marketplace. Piracy, file sharing and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically, and every artist has handled this blow differently.”
Music-streaming applications are an incredibly convenient method of listening to music whenever, wherever and totally on-demand. Spotify users have the option to listen for free – with advertisements and limited listening – or users can pay $9.99 a month for unlimited access to thousands of albums. In comparison, most albums cost about the same as a month of Spotify Premium.
It’s not as if Swift’s album sales are lagging. “1989” was predicted to sell 1.25 million copies in its first week, according to Billboard, breaking all kinds of records. What’s more, Swift earned upwards of $40 million in 2013 alone. True, a large portion of that income was likely from touring, but the number is too large to be discounted. Swift’s finances are certainly not suffering.
Yet, Swift makes a good argument for artists losing sales from Spotify and other music-streaming outlets. Swift is not the first artist to remove her music from the application — Adele, Beyoncé and Coldplay chose to take selected music off Spotify as well.
While Swift’s music is played often, resulting in a high compensation, lesser-known artists are essentially giving their music away for free when featured on Spotify. True, in featuring their music on the app, they gain exposure they may not have gotten had they simply released an album, yet it likely still stings to receive little compensation for it. In pulling her music, Swift could be a positive advocate in fighting for better compensation for such artists, but without a statement, Swift’s stunt seems a little selfish, and media response has been largely negative.
But is it really selfish? Less than 20 years ago when purchasing the album and listening to the radio were the standard methods of accessing music, album sales soared. Now, the culture of music ownership is giving way to a free market. When releasing albums, artists should expect to make a profit off the labor that went into writing, recording and producing their songs, yet music-streaming — whether legal or not — has created a generation of music-lovers who can’t fathom paying for a song. Even if all artists pulled their music from Spotify, Pandora and the like, there is little doubt that someone would find a crafty way to download the music for free somewhere else.
It’s difficult to feel bad for a person with a net worth of about $200 million, but Swift and other artists pulling from Spotify should not be vilified for asking to be paid for their songs. People pay artists to own their paintings, sculptures, books and films. Music is no different.
