Recently, Taylor Swift removed all her music from Spotify, I was really disappointed as I’ve always loved to stream ‘Shake it Off’ for my cardio workouts. Spotify has changed the way I listen to music, it syncs beautifully across my devices, it plays high bitrate 320kbps music that I’m contended with, and best of all I’m subscribed to Maxis’ Spotify plan at just RM9.90/month.
Prior to subscribing Spotify, my downloading activities were crazy, I could download an average of 3 albums per week from torrents or 10 singles from Chinese music platforms such as Kuwo and Baidu, it was fun back then, but I feel sorry for the artist that produced the music. I personally experienced it when I create my own gadget review videos, it was so difficult to produce one creative content that you hate it when people don’t appreciate or started copying what you are doing.
While Taylor Swift claims that Spotify isn’t paying artists fairly, I kind of have to second that, Spotify pays artist between $0.006 to $0.008 per track streamed, that’s pretty stingy for sure and you need to have millions of playback until you can get a pretty good income from it. Coming from a customer’s point of view, I do appreciate and love music a lot, that’s why I choose to pay for Spotify’s service because it is affordable and yet I’m able to support the artist in some way instead of buying CDs that takes up space in my cabinet or from iTunes where I’m only limited to sync across my Apple devices.
Spotify themselves have claimed that they are paying almost 70% of their revenue back to artists, they have changed the music industry and the way I’ve listen to music, but having artists like Swift walking away with a reason that they are not paying fairly isn’t fair to me as well. Put it this way, I’m a paying customer for the music service and yet the artist is trying to say I need to pay more for her music, is this even fair to a consumer when the artist mentioned that?
Music streaming service is changing the entire music industry and it’s the way to go for people who carries smartphones and tablets, if Spotify wants to change that perspective, they could have offered lossless streaming quality subscriptions and that could probably do some justice for artists like Taylor Swift. While Swift has still remained her presence back in other services such as Rdio and Beats Music, I really can’t see why she only chose to walk away from the largest music streaming service but not others.
Of course, this entire article isn’t really about Taylor Swift, I’m talking about the future of artists and music streaming services, I have to agree that art isn’t cheap and we must pay for it, all I want is the convenience of a music streaming service and I don’t really mind paying something more if they are paying fairly to the artist, because artists deserve the credit that they’ve worked their asses off. Simply put, if artists continue to complain that companies aren’t paying them fairly, we the consumers are the ultimate losers. So Spotify, please do something and save the music industry again, stop me from downloading illegally and make me continue to support artists while you pay them fairly with the money I’ve paid.
