Taylor Swift versus Spotify

[Undertoad]

Swift loses:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...urrentPage=all

In early November, when Swift’s new album, “1989,” was released, her label, Big Machine Records, not only declined to make the album available on Spotify but also removed her entire catalogue from the service. Is this a gesture of artistic solidarity, or, as one insider put it, “a stunt to wring the last drop of blood out of what is a dying model”—i.e., album sales? Swift’s impressive first-week sales of “1989,” which were just under 1.3 million albums, making her the year’s top seller, are still well short of the all-time first-week high, 2.4 million, set by ’N Sync, in 2000. And the sixty-nine-per-cent drop-off in “1989” ’s second-week sales suggests that Swift’s seventy-one million Facebook fans didn’t rush out and buy the album when they couldn’t get it on Spotify. They just streamed whatever was available on YouTube, which pays artists even less than Spotify does, or on other sites. Or they set sail for the Pirate Bay, where the album was also No. 1.

Bold mine. When you hear or read about how much Spotify is hurting artists, remember the other side of the equation: piracy broke the old models, not Spotify. Spotify is the correction of that: make music everything available online, in a better and more convenient format than piracy, and people will choose that, and piracy will not succeed.

Taylor Swift's end run is a cynical money play.