EVERYONE’S favourite pop singer, Taylor Swift has become the latest big artist to pull their music from Spotify and other music streaming services. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t the future.
The decision means that a large number of fans will have only one option to hear “1989,” and that’s to buy it — which hundreds of thousands of people have already done. Music’s most influential artist is simultaneously making a political statement and a savvy business move.
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. David Bakula, Nielsen music analyst, said Swift is on pace to challenge the 1.2 million copies she sold the first week her last album, “Red,” went on sale.
Taylor Swift’s latest album “1989” will be the highest selling album of 2014.Source:Supplied
Music streaming services and file sharing have sharply cut into music sales for artists over the past couple of years. Many artists complain that the fees Spotify pays to record labels and music publishers, with a portion eventually funnelled to musicians, is too small.
The “1989” album has never streamed on Spotify, although “Shake It Off” was allowed on the service. All of the music Swift has officially released in her career, including “Shake It Off,” was pulled on Monday.
Spotify’s Taylor Swift page right now. pic.twitter.com/h9SLP6i6oZ
— Mark Di Stefano (@MarkDiStef) November 3, 2014She’s not the first big artist to pull music from the service, with Thom Yorke taking down all of Atom’s for Peace’s albums from the service. They have good reason to as well. As it stands, Spotify and other streaming services only really offer artists “exposure”, and when you’re Taylor Swift, the Beatles or Radiohead, you don’t really need exposure. Sure, they might make anywhere between $US0.006 to $US0.0084 every time a song is streamed, but that’s barely enough to even break even for the big guys, let alone indie artists.
Taylor Swift is just about the only artist who is actually selling CDs like the industry used to pre-iTunes era. Her latest album 1989 set to become the highest selling album since 2002.
In fact, 1989 is set to go platinum and will be the only pop album released in 2014 to do so.
Taylor Swift is the only artist in the world who can do that. No one else can sell albums even close to that. iTunes was said to be the saviour of the music world when it was unveiled, but even its sales have dropped since services like Spotify have become popular.
But streaming services are still growing exponentially.
It’s up to record labels now to work out whether or not they want to embrace them, or continue the old way of selling albums. But you have to remember, while there might be a million people who think her album is worth spending their money on, 10 times that many people think spending the same amount of money a month on Spotify’s entire library is a good deal too.
