Taylor Swift did two major things this week; One: she sold over a million copies of her album, 1989, making her the only artist in history to sell in excess of a million albums on their first three albums. Two: she pulled her music from Spotify.
We were already aware of her feelings on free music—she wrote about it for the Wall Street Journal a few months ago—but we weren’t quite sure of the reasons behind the withdrawal of all her records from Spotify. She didn’t talk about it at all for a few days, leaving everyone to draw their own conclusions.
However, she’s finally revealed why she chose to do it: because she doesn’t think artists are making enough money from the streaming service.
‘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,’ she told Yahoo. ‘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. And I just don't agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free.’
Not streaming her album likely scored her significantly higher sales of 1989, although she says she’s not 100% certain what the numbers would look like if she had streamed it. Would she have sold just half of what she did? She has no clue, she says.
‘If I had streamed the new album, it's impossible to try to speculate what would have happened. A lot of people were suggesting to me that I try putting new music on Spotify with Shake It Off, and so I was open-minded about it. I thought, "I will try this; I'll see how it feels." It didn't feel right to me. I felt like I was saying to my fans, "If you create music someday, if you create a painting someday, someone can just walk into a museum, take it off the wall, rip off a corner off it, and it's theirs now and they don't have to pay for it." I didn't like the perception that it was putting forth. And so I decided to change the way I was doing things.’
She’s not totally adverse to all the new developments in the music industry, and says she knows things will continue to change but she’s not sure if all that’s been happening is of benefit to the actual artists.
‘I try to stay really open-minded about things, because I do think it's important to be a part of progress. But I think it's really still up for debate whether this is actual progress, or whether this is taking the word "music" out of the music industry.’
She also announced that the second single from 1989 will be Blank Space, a track that pokes fun at her media persona. She told her producers she wanted to write a ‘completely satirical song about the fictionalisation of [my] personal life, and just kind of poke fun at it.’
She’s already shot the video, too. ‘The fact that it ended up being a sort of shining spot on the album is really exciting for me. Because I think it's gonna be really interesting when people see things we have up our sleeve, like the video and other things that I'm really excited about people discovering. It's probably the wildest video I've done.’
Picture: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.