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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

opinion

I love Taylor Swift but she is wrong about this

Taylor Swift, following the release of her fifth album, “1989,” has removed her entire music catalog from the popular streaming service Spotify.

She apparently felt the service was promoting the idea that “music has no value and should be free” and that this was an “experiment” that she did not feel comfortable contributing her work to.

The problem with this assertion is the naiveté about the consumers to which she is marketing and what I feel is a misinterpretation of the purpose of art.

I am a Taylor Swift fan and have been even back when her music still resembled country music.

So it is not a misplaced ironic superiority complex that makes me question her motives in this case.

I believe the old model of buying an album for standard sum is no longer efficient.

Spotify was launched in the U.S. in 2010, and it saved the music industry from the future of rampant illegal downloads.

Spotify offers its users millions of tracks for free and the ability to make playlists and share music with other users.

Spotify makes its profit from the ads and from a premium option, which costs a relatively small fee a month.

It is this revenue that pays the artist for contributing their music to the site.

Taylor Swift feels that this compensation is not equal to the work she was contributing, and she is welcome to feel that way. It is, after all, her work.

She is wrong, however, in assuming that the entire system is failing.

Removing her work from the service in no way means that Spotify users will be forced to purchase her album instead.

The much more realistic outcome of this is that she will have alienated potential listeners who are not going to seek out her music but who might have been exposed to it on the free service.

The model of music now is that people buy albums they already know they like.

If people can’t hear it for free, they are likely to illegally download it in order to avoid wasting money on something they hate.

With this move, she hasn’t made room for more sales. She has opened the likelihood of more thefts.

However, with 1.3 million sales in one week , Swift is less worried about making money and more worried about the principle.

Art absolutely has value, and artists should be compensated for working, but the idea of withholding art from those who cannot afford imposed market costs defeats the ?purpose.

As for her manager’s statement that “Music has never been free,” it just goes to show how willfully misunderstanding they are of the roots and purposes of music.

Music is meant to comfort and connect to its listeners, a service it has been providing since the beginning of time — especially considering that country music stems from the folk music tradition, which was completely free.

Taylor took that away.

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