Taylor Swift Talks About Taking Her Music Off Spotify

Taylor Swift caused a lot of controversy this week when she decided that she would not let Spotify stream any of her albums anymore and now she is explaining her decision.

“If I had streamed the new album, it’s impossible to try to speculate what would have happened,” the 24-year-old singer told Yahoo, referring to her record album sales week.

“But all I can say is that music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like 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,” Taylor added. “And I just don’t agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free.”

“I wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal this summer that basically portrayed my views on this. I try to stay really open-minded about things, because I do think it’s important to be a part of progress. But I think it’s really still up for debate whether this is actual progress, or whether this is taking the word “music” out of the music industry,” she continued.

“Also, 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. 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,” Taylor concluded.

WHAT DO YOU THINK of Taylor Swift’s explanation for leaving Spotify?