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Taylor Swift Versus Spotify: How the Music Industry Is Still Fighting Streaming

2014's only platinum album doesn't need Spotify. Does anyone else?

Streaming services notoriously pay so poorly that the only thing they can really offer is "exposure"—a currency that is offered to remunerate writers and musicians, but one which they conspicuously can't use to pay rent or buy groceries. If there's one thing Taylor Swift has more of than money, it's exposure. So it shouldn't be a surprise that Swift's newest album and her back catalog have disappeared from Spotify and other streaming services. When you're Taylor Swift, what's it going to do for you?

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She's not the first to snub Spotify. Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich pulled Atoms for Peace's albums from the service, although Radiohead's back catalog remains available, with the exception of In Rainbows. Beyoncé's self-titled surprise album only has four of 14 tracks available for streaming, thanks to a deal with Apple, intended to bolster sales through iTunes. The Beatles aren't on Spotify either.

What do all of these artists have in common? They're all well-enough established that they and their record labels have figured out—or are gambling—that Spotify's $0.006 to $0.0084 per stream isn't worth it, and may actually be costing them money.

"Artists occasionally will not release their new album on an interactive service sometimes for months because they don't want to cannibalize sales," David Oxenford of Broadcast Law Blog told the Lexblog Network. "They're afraid that if you can call it up on demand you're not going to buy the CD or download it from iTunes."

There doesn't appear to be the same fear that Rdio, or Google Play, or the Taylor Swift Vevo YouTube page are going to cannibalize sales, as songs from her older albums remain available there, at least for now.

Taylor Swift might be the last person for whom the old, pre-Napster music industry model is still working—according to Billboard, 1989 is "set to earn the largest sales week for any album since 2002, when Eminem's The Eminem Show sold 1.322 million in its first full week on sale." If 1989 sells like Billboard is projecting, it will be Swift's third album in a row that went platinum in its first week for sale—unprecedented, in this or any other era.

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It's good news for Swift, but so far 1989 is the only pop album released in 2014 to go platinum. Just the one. Taylor Swift sells albums; the music industry doesn't. iTunes was going to be the cure to the swooning industry, but music downloads have been dropping recently as well.

Streaming services are the only ones that are growing. Spotify boasts 40 million users. As it gains clout, it's going to be harder for artists who aren't Taylor, Beyoncé, or Thom Yorke to avoid. At the same time, the already-successful top artists are the only ones making real cash.

Spotify, for its part, does a competent job of playing the good guy—positioning itself as the paid panacea to piracy and the easiest service for its users. It also subtly blames the artists "or their representatives" when music isn't available for streaming, saying "we are working on it and hope they will change their mind soon." A post from "The Spotify Team" titled "On Taylor Swift's Decision To Remove Her Music from Spotify" cast the streaming service and all of its users as jilted, Taylor Swift-esque narrators, and posted a "What To Play While Taylor's Away" playlist.

"We hope [Swift]'ll change her mind and join us in building a new music economy that works for everyone," the post stated. "We believe fans should be able to listen to music wherever and whenever they want, and that artists have an absolute right to be paid for their work and protected from piracy."

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But Swift has already had a head start in the battle for hearts, minds, and dollars of the remaining few people who buy music. Not only is she beloved enough to sell albums, she was savvy enough to have published a Wall Street Journal op-ed four months ago.

"The value of an album is, and will continue to be, based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work, and the financial value that artists (and their labels) place on their music when it goes out into the marketplace," Swift wrote. "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. I hope they don't underestimate themselves or undervalue their art."

It's weird that anyone yearns for the days when record labels decided albums' price points—remember $16 CDs?—but I guess it's on-point marketing for an album that is yearning for the late '80s. And as the year's highest selling album, I guess the numbers speak for themselves. People have agreed with the artist and her label that 1989 is worth about 10 bucks. Ten times this number have also agreed that Spotify's massive catalog is worth 10 bucks a month.

Not everyone is Taylor Swift, who can afford to resist Spotify. But Spotify has proven over and over that if people can't get the Beatles, they'll listen to the Rolling Stones; if they can't get the early really great Kinks records, they'll take the later Kinks.

Still, if on-demand streaming is supposed to be a way for artists to get paid, it's instructive that the relationship between streaming services and artists is one that artists only enter into when they have to, and one they shed when they can.