Taylor Swift Defends Pulling Her Music From Spotify

Taylor Swift Defends Pulling Her Music From Spotify

Taylor Swift is defending her decision to break up with the popular streaming music service Spotify and as of now, it doesn't look like the two will get back together. Like, ever.

The 24-year-old country-turned-pop star and songwriter's move came soon after she released her anticipated new album, 1989, which has sold more than 1.2 million copies in its first week, and three months after she declared in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that, in her opinion, "music should not be free." The record was also leaked early, which angered many fans.

"If I had streamed the new album, it's impossible to try to speculate what would have happened," Swift told Yahoo! Music in an interview posted on Thursday. "But all I can say is that music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment. And I'm not willing to contribute my life's work to an experiment that I don't feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music. And I just don't agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free."

Spotify offers both paid subscription and free, ad-incorporated services, and has been criticized itself over how much it compensates artists and others involved in the music creation process. According to its website, music rights holders are paid an average of 0.6 cents to 0.84 cents per stream, which can total thousands of dollars for popular artists and songs but often just pennies for lesser-known acts.

"A lot of people were suggesting to me that I try putting new music on Spotify with "Shake It Off," and so I was open-minded about it," she told Yahoo! Music. "I thought, 'I will try this; I'll see how it feels.' It didn't feel right to me. I felt like I was saying to my fans, 'If you create music someday, if you create a painting someday, someone can just walk into a museum, take it off the wall, rip off a corner off it, and it's theirs now and they don't have to pay for it.' I didn't like the perception that it was putting forth. And so I decided to change the way I was doing things."