Taylor Swift shakes off Spotify, pulls entire catalog
Just as 1989 looks set to become the first platinum album of the year, it looks as though the world's biggest pop star and its biggest streaming service have broken up: Taylor Swift's entire back catalog has disappeared from Spotify. Although neither Swift nor her label have acknowledged the move, Spotify has posted an impassioned, pun-filled appeal on its official blog requesting Swift returns her music to the service.
Swift's latest album, 1989, has been absent from Spotify since day one. The young singer-songwriter is a staunch proponent of the album as a medium: earlier this year she penned an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, saying that "piracy, file sharing and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically... 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." The op-ed was controversial, to say the least, with publications like The Washington Post and Vox taking time out from their busy schedules to completely tear it apart. Nonetheless, Swift's position as one of the most popular artists around has ensured that her album sales remain astronomically high.
Swift isn't the first artist to fall out of love with streaming services, of course. Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke withdrew his solo tracks from Spotify last year claiming that artists do not receive a large enough cut of revenues. Spotify, for its part, says it pays "nearly 70 percent" of its revenue "back to the music community." Strangely, Swift's backcatalog is still available on other streaming services, including Rdio, Pandora and Deezer, but until her label comments on her music's departure from Spotify, it's unclear whether the pair are ever getting back together.
[Image credit: Taylor Swift / Instagram]
