TIME: Taylor shouldn't have removed her music from Spotify
Quote:
On Monday, Taylor Swift made headlines by pulling her entire catalogue—save one song—from Spotify’s streaming music service. [...] Unfortunately for Swift, her prediction won’t come true. Streaming music services like Spotify are the future of the industry, and resistance is futile.
Swift is correct that Spotify’s existence is hurting digital downloads and physical sales. MIDiA Research, an analysis and consulting firm focussed on digital music, finds that 23% of streaming customers used to buy multiple albums a month. Now, instead of handing labels—and artists—multiple payments of $10-plus payments every 30-days, they’re spending just $9.99 on a streaming subscription. In this way, Spotify is costing Swift money.
But that’s really only true if we, like Swift, assume the alternative to Spotify are album sales. That’s false. Instead, Spotify customers spurned by the pop goddess can simply go to YouTube, GrooveShark, SoundCloud, or any number of other on-demand streaming alternatives nearly every teenager is intimately familiar with.
The RIAA reports that streaming services grew 28% in the first-half of 2014 alone and now account for 27% of industry revenue. According to Crupnick, 42% of 14- to 34-year-olds—the people most likely to listen to Taylor Swift—listen to music using either on-demand services like Spotify and YouTube or through internet radio services like Pandora. Forget about the future, streaming is how much of the public experiences music right now.
For labels, the choice is not between Spotify and album sales, but rather between Spotify and a host of less-lucrative streaming options. Artists might only make a fraction of a cent off a Spotify play, but they make even less on YouTube views, and nothing when users of SoundCloud or other similar sites upload an artist’s tracks on their own.
Nonetheless, what they're saying is true and I think Big Machine will realise this soon enough. However, as people have intimated, it doesn't seem so much to do with streaming v sales but the future sale of Big Machine as a label.
She can always put it on another streaming service though. Spotify will be the ones losing out.
Taylor can afford to live without Spotify's streaming revenue, she will have to cope with her $64 million earnings for the year.
Also funny to see randoms on the internet calling her dumb when she has sold more albums than any other album released this year in just a single week and has the top two singles on itunes. Yeah obviously she knows nothing about how this music business thing works and should be following the advice of randoms from the internet. ROFL
@ some random thinking she knows what is better for 10 years in music industry veteran. 