Swift is not the first artist to withdraw music from spotify. I hope they don’t underestimate themselves or undervalue their art.” 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. Writing in the Wall Street Journal in July this year, the singer said: “Music is art, and art is important and rare. But the singer’s relationship with the site has always been rocky – Swift initially refused to release her 2012 album Red on Spotify, critising the fact that artists receive between just $0.006 and $0.0084 per song play. Her songs were on 19m playlists and the lead single from 1989, Shake It Off, went straight to number one on Spotify. The singer was one of Spotify’s most popular artists, with 25% of listeners having streamed her songs.
The move has been condemned by some as shortsighted and applauded by others as a savvy way to drive up her album sales. It boasts more than 10 million paying subscribers, across 58 countries, on top of the 30 million who access the streaming service for free. Yet this week was also marked by Swift’s decision to remove her entire back catalogue from music streaming site Spotify, arguably the biggest growing source of music consumption in the world. It will also be the first album to sell more than 1m copies in the US this year amid declines across the industry.
The singer’s latest album, 1989, is expected to have the largest sales week for any album since 2002, when Eminem sold a little over 1.3m copies of The Eminem Show in its first week. This may well be remembered as the week Taylor Swift established herself as the most powerful 24-year-old in music industry history.
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