Taylor Swift's new album, 1989, has famously become the first album in 2014 to go platinum, having sold over 1.2 million copies in its first week of release, and though the album certainly would have become a big seller no matter what, its stellar sales figures can be partially attributed to Swift's decision to pull all of her music from Spotify. In a new interview with Yahoo! Music, the 24-year-old singer explains her unusual decision, citing the uncertainty of the future of streaming, as well as Spotify's notoriously poor compensation of musicians.
"If I had streamed the new album, it's impossible to try to speculate what would have happened," Swift admits, "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. And I just don't agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free."
Swift goes on to say how though her single, "Shake It Off," was available for streaming on Spotify, it "didn't feel right." "I didn't like the perception I was putting forth," she says, "And so I decided to change the way I was doing things."
This isn't the first time that Swift has voiced her opinions about the value of music. In a Wall Street Journal piece written over the summer, Swift wrote, "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."
You can check out the music video for Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off" right here:
