Taylor Swift has broken up with Spotify. Her first move to limit digital distribution was to keep her new album, 1989, completely off streaming websites after its release—to huge sales—last week. Now Swift has followed by yanking her entire back catalog from Spotify, the streaming service with the most subscribers.
Swift is already on record as a streaming skeptic. “Piracy, file sharing, and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically, and every artist has handled this blow differently,” she wrote in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year. But musicians struggling to deal with the economics of digital music don’t really face an either-or proposition, and her gesture of protest by going dark on Spotify doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Keeping 1989 off the streaming services is a savvy and understandable move for the debut of a highly anticipated album by one of the few remaining pop stars capable of posting meaningful sales. Fans looking for a legal way to listen to Swift’s newest songs had to pay for the album, and it sold briskly. The same no-streaming policy was in place for her 2012 album, Red, which also saw big sales.
But taking her back catalog off Spotify is a head-scratching move. The business of royalties in music is complicated, but basically it works like this: Artists make more money when customers pay for their songs, and when people pick their songs specifically, as opposed to when they show up in Internet radio services. Spotify has more than 10 million paid subscribers for its on-demand service. So Spotify royalties tilt toward the artist’s favor compared with those of online rivals such as YouTube (GOOG) and Pandora (P). Yet Swift fans can still listen to her music on both of those services and several others. If Swift is going to participate in the Internet at all, she should stay with Spotify.
Spotify sure wants her back. In September, Swift was the most popular artist on the service among listeners in the U.S., and the company’s chief executive officer, Daniel Ek, has taken to Twitter (TWTR) to make his case. The company notes that it dedicates about 70 percent of its revenue to royalties.
Finally, Spotify went for a time-honored trick for spurned lovers trying to win someone over: It made Swift a playlist.
