“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,” stated Taylor Swift on her decision to pull all of her music from Spotify.

According to Spotify’s website, it is a digital music service that gives you access to millions of songs. Anyone can create a free account, but a premium version, at $120 a year, gives users special perks, such as listening offline without ads. Business Insider states that about 25% of Spotify’s 50 million active users pay for the service.

In July of this year, she even wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal about placing value on what musicians have created, openly stating that she is, for the most part, against streaming services.

Artists generally don’t make nearly as much money putting their music on Spotify as they do selling digital albums and songs on services like iTunes.

Spotify claims to pays 70% of its revenue to labels, which totals to about $1 billion this year, but some artists feel they don’t get a big enough cut. Last year, it revealed that record labels, who take a cut before the artist sees a paycheck, received less than a penny per play.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek claimed top artists, such as Taylor Swift, would earn as much as $6 million in a year. Swift’s record label, in what seems like an attempt to belittle her earnings from Spotify, revealed she earned only $500,000 from domestic streaming. However, Time Magazine reported that Swift’s label, in the past year, earned $2 million from global streaming.

Jonathan Price, Spotify’s global head of communications and public policy, explained these conflicting figures to Time, “Our users, both free and paid, have grown by more than 50 percent in the last year, which means that the run rate for artists of every level of popularity keeps climbing. And Taylor just put out a great record, so her popularity has grown too. We paid Taylor’s label and publisher roughly half a million dollars in the month before she took her catalog down-without even having ‘1989’ on our service-and that was only going to go up.”

In a Bloomberg Businessweek cover story, the owner of Swift’s record label, Scott Borchetta, said, “We’re not against anybody, but we’re not responsible for new business models… If they work, fantastic, but it can’t be at the detriment of our own business. That’s what Spotify is.”

In comparison to her Spotify earnings, Swift’s new album “1989” was expected to net about $12 million in gross sales in its first week. She ended up selling 1.287 million albums in the first week, making her the only artist ever to have three albums sell a million copies in their first week.

Business Insider reasons that the arguments she makes, and the numbers she uses to make it, only apply to her, as one of the most popular entertainers in the world. That’s not true for everybody. She doesn’t need Spotify because of her ability to push actual, physical albums, on top of digital copies, both in enormous amounts.

While Swift clearly believes Spotify does not value artist’s work enough, it is possible she is only able to take this stance due to her incredible popularity. Her decision to pull her catalog off Spotify was a brilliant business move that earns her millions of dollars. However, that doesn’t mean her argument about “fair compensation” is untrue.

In an interview with Time magazine Swift shared, “I’m always up for trying something. And I tried it and I didn’t like the way it felt. I think there should be an inherent value placed on art. I didn’t see that happening, perception-wise, when I put my music on Spotify. Everybody’s complaining about how music sales are shrinking, but nobody’s changing the way they’re doing things. They keep running towards streaming, which is, for the most part, what has been shrinking the numbers of paid album sales.”

FSA Connection Questions

1. The author seems to offer what main idea?
2. Select the best two sentences from the article that best support the main idea.
3. Which sentence from the article contains an opinion?
4. What is the author’s main purpose in writing this article?
5. What information, if added, could best support the author’s purpose?