So that's why! Though it's no surprise, Taylor Swift finally revealed to Yahoo! Music on Thursday, Nov. 6, why she recently pulled her music from Spotify entirely.
"All I can say is that music is changing so quickly," Swift, 24, said about her controversial stance and refusal to stream music online. "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. 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. And I just don't agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free."
Swift also cited her op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal published this past summer. "I try to stay really open-minded about things, because I do think it's important to be a part of progress," she told Yahoo. "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 revealed to Yahoo that she was advised by many experts to put her first single from 1989, "Shake It Off," on the streaming service. After briefly allowing Spotify users to stream her hit, Swift ultimately decided to pull it — along with the rest of her smash tunes.
"It didn't feel right to me," she reasoned. "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.' And so I decided to change the way I was doing things."
The singer, whose fifth studio album sold a record-shattering 1.2987 million copies in its first week, said she was shocked by the amount of support she's received. "I hoped that I had created something that people would want to buy," she confessed. (Swift's 1989 has boasted the biggest sales of any album in its first week since The Eminem Show in 2002.) "I just was hoping and praying that people still perceived there to be a value to someone's musical creation."
