Taylor Swift Comments on Spotify Exit

Spotify announced in a recent statement that Taylor Swift had removed all of her music from the online streaming service following the release of her new album '1989'.

Swift's label Big Machine ordered Spotify to remove all of her songs from the service, in an attempt to boost sales from her albums and songs.

Now, in an interview with Yahoo, the singer has expanded upon her decision, saying:

"If I had streamed the new album, it's impossible to try to speculate what would have happened. But 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. 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."

"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.

"Also, 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."

As BWW previously wrote, it is not an uncommon practice in the music business to withhold songs from Spotify for a limited time before releasing them for streaming, and many artists such as Adele, Coldplay and Beyoncé have done the same in the past. Initiallly selling the albums as downloads and as CDs yields much higher royalty rates than does releasing music to an online streaming service immediately. Downloads and CDs also lead to higher opening week numbers, giving artists bragging rights in the music industry. Swift's most recent album, '1989', was released no differently, although a single from the album titled 'Shake It Off' was released for streaming.

Big Machine's request to remove Swift's music from Spotify was answered, and as of Monday, November 3, her music is no longer available on the service. Spotify responded to the issue with a passive-aggresive sounding blog post titled, "On Taylor Swift's Decision to Remove Her Music From Spotify" where they went on to defend their unique business model.

Initial sales of '1989' were lower than expected, but as of Thursday, November 6, the album had topped the charts with 1.287 million albums sold, making Swift's release one of the biggest of 2014.

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