Taylor Swift News 2014: Big Machine Records vs Spotify, Singer Says 'I Didn't Like The Way It Felt' [VIDEO]
Taylor Swift pulled her music from the popular music streaming site Spotify and since it has been an ongoing war of sorts between the streaming site and her record label.
On Nov. 3 Swift pulled her entire catalog of music from Spotify after dropping her latest album, 1989, just the week prior. Swift said in an interview with Yahoo! Music, "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 added, "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."
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Swift holds music very dear to her heart. She even wrote an op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal earlier this year about the future of the music industry.
In that piece Swift said, "Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. 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. I hope they don't underestimate themselves or undervalue their art."
Now things have been heating up between Swift and her label with Spotify. Swift's label's CEO, Scott Borchetta, told TIME Wednesday Nov. 12 that Swift has been paid less than $500,000 in the past 12 months for domestic streaming of her songs, while the Spotify CEO, Daniel Ek made a statement the day prior insisting that the label for an artist of Swift's popularity could expect to receive $6 million in the next year from the streaming service as the site's audience grows.
Borchetta, however, said his label had made more from streaming Swift's videos on the video site Vevo than it has from putting her music on Spotify.
In the end though, Swift told TIME, "I didn't like the way it felt. I think there should be an inherent value placed on art. I didn't see that happening, perception-wise, when I put my music on Spotify. Everybody's complaining about how music sales are shrinking, but nobody's changing the way they're doing things. They keep running towards streaming, which is, for the most part, what has been shrinking the numbers of paid album sales."
It seems like Swift and her label are set on staying off of Spotify. How do you feel about this situation?
You can watch her music videos on Vevo and YouTube. Below you can see her latest video for Blank Space.
