Dive Brief:
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Music streaming company Spotify announced Monday that Taylor Swift removed her entire music library from its service and said in a blog post that the company hopes she’ll return.
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Business Insider later in the day reported that sources say the “real reason” behind the move was that the CEO of Swift’s record company, Big Machine Label Group, is interested in selling the label and wants to boost record sales by taking away Spotify’s free-to-cheap alternative.
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But Swift is on the record, in an an op-ed she published in July in the Wall Street Journal, saying that she believes that the future of the music industry is bright, but that artists shouldn’t undervalue their music by giving it away or selling it too cheaply. “My hope for the future, not just in the music industry, but in every young girl I meet,” she wrote, “is that they all realize their worth and ask for it.”
Dive Insight:
Just when you thought the future of music retail is streaming — Apple certainly took that bet with its $3 billion acquisition of Beats — along comes one of the world’s biggest pop stars to shake things up, or in Taylor Swift’s case, perhaps, shake things off. It may be true, as sources told Business Insider, that Big Machine Label Group president and CEO Scott Borchetta wants to boost the value of his company by selling more Taylor Swift albums, and that that concern is behind her move.
Yet, theoretically, any label and any artist — and any retailer — wants to sell as many albums as possible; nobody really needs a special reason to want to sell more of what they make. While Spotify says it returns 70% of its revenues to the artists, that still can’t compete with old-fashioned record sales, even paid digital downloads. Sales of Swift's latest album appear destined to set records.
Swift seems to be following through on what she wrote in her editorial in July. And if big-name artists like her become hesitant about making their work available on streaming services, the trajectory streaming seems to be on may not actually be so clear.
