Spotify has benefitted greatly from riding out the contemporary news cycle, which tends to be about as forgetful as an aging hippie trying to remember whether he actually was at Woodstock or just saw the documentary on acid. What was once derided as an insult to musicians is now accepted as the status quo—yes, they still pay $0.005 a song, but the premium app is so convenient.
But now that she’s reinvented herself from a celebrity everyone hates to a celebrity everyone loves by means of a similar cultural amnesia, Taylor Swift is taking a stand against Spotify and similar streaming services. She did this by pulling her entire catalog (including her new album) from Spotify Monday, a day that turned out to be a very busy Taylor Swift news day.
Swift defended her decision as a matter of principle in an interview with Yahoo! News yesterday, saying she sees Spotify as a “grand experiment” in which she has no interest in participating until the service compensates artists fairly.
“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 said. “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.”
That, and she stands to make a lot more money if people actually have to pay $1.29 to listen to eight seconds of white noise.
[via Variety]
