Time Magazine Calls Taylor Swift's Rejection Of Spotify 'A Losing Bet'

Taylor Swift

On MONDAY (NET NEWS 11/3), ALL ACCESS told you that on the same day TAYLOR SWIFT announced plans for a world tour in support of her new “1989” album and hours before expected record-setting sales figures for her latest project are due, BIG MACHINE RECORDS instructed SPOTIFY to remove her entire catalog from its subscription streaming service.

BIG MACHINE Pres./CEO SCOTT BORCHETTA has long been a vocal critic of streaming services such as SPOTIFY, saying on more than one occasion, to different publications that the streaming business model is, “A race to the bottom.”

Now, TIME is writing SWIFT's spurning of SPOTIFY and rejecting the streaming business model is "a losing bet."

SWIFT famously penned an op-ed in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL earlier this year, explaining “piracy, file sharing and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically, and every artist has handled this blow differently.” SWIFT continued, “music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. 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.”

TIME disagrees, noting "Unfortunately for SWIFT, her prediction won’t come true. Streaming music services like SPOTIFY are the future of the industry, and resistance is futile," adding "it's fitting that TAYLOR SWIFT’s new album is titled 1989, because that’s the period SWIFT likely wishes she lived in. Two years before the advent of the World Wide Web, 1989 would have indeed been a time when music labels had complete control of album pricing and distribution. There was no Internet piracy then. The iTUNES store, the industry’s previous boogeyman-turned-savior, was more than a decade away. Fans could either pay sticker price for new releases or they could sit by their radios, and most did both. In 2014, the equation could not be more different."

Read the full article here.

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