Taylor Swift decided to break up with Spotify, reports E news online, “and it doesn’t look like the two will get back together. Like, ever.”After recently dropping her new album “1989,” BYU-Hawaii Taylor Swift fans said they are disappointed they cannot listen to her album via Spotify. “I’m a T-Swift fan, and it is annoying...I can’t enjoy her music for free,” said Michelle Chandler, a freshman elementary education major from Utah. Swift said in a Yahoo! Music article that with the quickly changing music industry, Spotify promotes the perception music has no value, should be free and is hurting the number of paid album sales to justify yanking all her songs from Spotify. BYUH user of Spotify, Mason Bell, a junior in exercise science from Utah, said he understands it’s about business, but “fans can’t enjoy the artist’s music if they can’t afford it.”Swift told Yahoo! Music, “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.” Melanie Pearson, a freshman in biological sciences from Utah, said she thinks on one side Swift’s decision is about getting paid for the work she does, but “on the other side, I hope other artists don’t follow. I can’t afford to buy every song that I like.”“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,” Swift told Yahoo! Music. “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.”The Wall Street Journal reported Swift asked Spotify several months ago to make her new album “1989” available on the streaming service only outside the United States as she is still trying to expand her fan base abroad. Spotify reportedly denied her request because the streaming service requires all participating artists to make their music available to all 58 countries where it operates.Spotify offers both paid subscriptions and free, ad-incorporated services, and has been criticized over how much it compensates artists and others involved in the music creation process. According to Spotify News blog, “We believe fans should be able to listen to music wherever and whenever they want, and that artists have an absolute right to be paid for their work and protected from piracy. That’s why we pay nearly 70 percent of our revenue back to the music community.”While Swift will keep her music off of Spotify, on Spotify’s blog the company responded to her saying, “We were both young when we first saw you, but now there’s more than 40 million of us who want you to stay, stay, stay.”AP reported, “More than 700,000 people bought ‘1989’ in the first two days it went on sale last week, according to Nielsen SoundScan. That already exceeds the year’s biggest one-week seller, Coldplay’s ‘Ghost Stories,’ which sold 383,000 in May. Nielsen music analyst, David Bakula, said that Swift, who announced she would launch a world tour next year, is on pace to challenge the 1.2 million copies she sold the first week her last album, ‘Red,’ went on sale.”
Writer: Jessica Tautfest ~ Multimedia Journalist
