Taylor Swift has pulled most of her catalog from the popular music streaming service, Spotify. In a statement, Swift said, “In my opinion, the value of an album is, and will continue to be, based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work, and the financial value that artists (and their labels) place on their music when it goes out into the marketplace. Piracy, file sharing and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically, and every artist has handled this blow differently.
The superstar added, “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.” Currently it is a small fee of $9.99 per month to stream your music, search and create playlists on both your laptop and mobile devices. Will Spotify care enough to have Swift on their service that they will amend monthly fees in order to pay more out to artists?
While several reports claim that Spotify does not pay a fraction to artists, according to the streaming website, they “have now paid out over $1 Billion USD in royalties to-date ($500 million of which we paid in 2013 alone).” They state, “we have proudly achieved these payouts despite having relatively few users compared to radio, iTunes or Pandora, and as we continue to grow we expect that we will generate many billions more in royalties!”
