Thoughts on Taylor Swift?

v0n said:
I think she's too young to be so wrong about these things. To promote her album she will happily put her single/promo/excerpt from the album on the radio, more often then not as part of the royalty free weekly showreel (that's why you hear 10-15 songs repeated over and over on commercial stations, they are free to play, if not actually paid for to be played by label) and it will blast on in every shop, every car, every mall and every elevator as unwanted freebie for weeks, until you are sick of it. But she doesn't treat internet radio/streaming service as a lead on to physical sales or price of acquiring listeners leading to ticket sales. I would expect this from someone stuck in eighties like Metallica (and oddly they actually support Apple Music) , not a young country turned pop star that made money purely because of internet media.
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Funny thinking of that. The worst one I remember of this was…

 
Raymond Lin said:
She hasn't said people should buy her albums. I thinks she said something like artist should be paid for their hard work/music and because Spotify has a free level, she doesn't think music should be free, or something to that effect.
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Yes, she did say that and that free level has advertising - are we suggesting none of that advertising revenue contributes to artist payments?
 
Xordium said:
Yes, she did say that and that free level has advertising - are we suggesting none of that advertising revenue contributes to artist payments?
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Artist getting paid by revenue that came from advertising isn't what she meant. I think she actually believe people should to pay for music if they want to listen to it, out of their pocket and Spotify's streaming model (on the free level) gives music zero value because it is free.

http://time.com/3578249/taylor-swift-interview/

Why did you leave Spotify? I’m in an office of people who are upset they can’t stream your music.

Well, they can still listen to my music if they get it on iTunes. 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.

With Beats Music and Rhapsody you have to pay for a premium package in order to access my albums. And that places a perception of value on what I’ve created. On Spotify, they don’t have any settings, or any kind of qualifications for who gets what music. I think that people should feel that there is a value to what musicians have created, and that’s that. I wrote about this in July, I wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal. This shouldn’t be news right now. It should have been news in July when I went out and stood up and said I’m against it. And so this is really kind of an old story.
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This is the article she wrote in the Wall Street Journal, although you need to have a subscription to read it.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/for-taylor-swift-the-future-of-music-is-a-love-story-1404763219

Although no doubt that the pulling of her music from Spotify co-inside with the release of her album 1989 has a significance, to increase sales. It is about money, no one can deny that.

Edit - http://time.com/3583129/power-of-taylor-swift-cover/, quite a detailed article actually.

About her albums sales, the numbers support her reasoning to pull it from Spotify.

Swift was the nation’s best-selling artist in 2008 and 2010 and No. 2 in 2012, the last three years she released albums. There’s every reason to expect her to finish No. 1 in 2014. Her first-week figure of 1.287 million copies sold for her new album, 1989, bests any album’s sales week since 2002’s The Eminem Show.

Swift and Eminem have something else in common: the two are the most successful writer-artists to break in and sustain such levels of popularity since the 1990s began. Among her pop peers, Rihanna and Miley Cyrus lean far more heavily on outside songwriters, while Lady Gaga and Beyoncé haven’t matched her sales. Swift is the only artist to have three albums sell a million copies in their first week since 1991, when SoundScan started keeping track. Before 1989, she sold nearly 70 million digital tracks. Billboard named her its woman of the year for 2014, the second time she’s received that distinction in the award’s eight-year history. Her last tour grossed $150 million–the biggest tally country music had ever seen.
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Raymond Lin said:
I think she actually believe people should to pay for music if they want to listen to it, out of their pocket and Spotify's streaming model (on the free level) gives music zero value because it is free.
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Then she is inconsistent in the application of that principle. She should pull all her music from radio and youtube etc then. That is pure hypocrisy.

Her music her right to do what she wants with it from a business model of course. I just find her arguments poor and not consistent and the advocates ignore a few obvious facts.

AlecR said:
Well she's putting her new album on Apple Music. I bet Spotify don't like that one bit.
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People will be saying this has all been instigated as a PR exercise.
 
Xordium said:
Then she is inconsistent in the application of that principle. She should pull all her music from radio and youtube etc then. That is pure hypocrisy.

Her music her right to do what she wants with it from a business model of course. I just find her arguments poor and not consistent and the advocates ignore a few obvious facts.



People will saying this has all been instigated as a PR exercise.
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Like I said, Radio and YouTube are a different medium, you can't click "Play" while you are driving or walking to school (perhaps you could on YouTube but not with the screen off).
 
Xordium said:
That's an interesting view.
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The reason she could do all this is no doubt because she practically controls the record company she is with as her dad is an investor and the record label is truly independent. I can imagine her parents having a financial background helps immensely in the development of her career in terms of building the business.

You can't see other artist pulling their music out of Spotify because their record company will no doubt object to that, fearing of losing income/revenue. Swift can take the gamble her own, with her dad's blessing.
 
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Xordium said:
Then she is inconsistent in the application of that principle. She should pull all her music from radio and youtube etc then. That is pure hypocrisy.
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she didn't like the idea of her entire back catalogue being available on spotify like that:
"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"
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she's not putting her entire life's work on youtube or allowing radio stations to play the entire back catalogue back to back without paying for it

tis not really the same, youtube/radio are used to promote singles, for PR etc.. it is album sales that artists will make the revenue from and spotify had entire albums available
 
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snowdog said:
Erm ? This is since 2008, and only on my pc&phone, let alone youtube views and grooveshark, etc :

Schermafdruk_2015_06_25_22_01_58s.png

Enough one hit wonders in that list.
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so seven years worth of plays and you've only got 36 songs with >200 plays, out of that list it is just ELO that might be near to getting the equivalent compensation from streaming that they'd get from selling an album to you

then again it is a sample size of one listener... would be interesting to see what the actual average number of plays are like across a large sample of users over time
 
It's actually the first 76 songs over 180 plays. ( or 58 at 200)

You're right in that it takes a long time, but I'll keep listening to ELO ( in this example) for a long while, they will continue to make money of me for decades ( or at least how long Spotify survives),
 
note I'm not saying it is good or bad for the artists, just that no one seems to have shown it either way - Taylor Swift might well be an incorrect innumerate numpty with her withdrawal from spotify, though she's got more data to make her decision from I guess
 
Its not 180 streams by 1 person, because more people stream than purchase.

Its 180 streams in a market of X, verses 1 purchase from a market of Y. And X is most certainly greater than Y.

Wether its 180 times greater is really hard to tell. But in the UK there were 14.8bn streamed songs compared to 156m purchased songs last year, meaning that in terms of volumes X is 94 times Y and growing rapidly.
In terms of people its difficult to tell, as I can't find figures for total UK streaming service users, or total UK purchase services users.
 
My thoughts on Taylor Swift? Well, although her music isn't to my taste, if given the opportunity, I'd give her the briefest, most disappointing sex of her life.

Also, kudos to her for her philanthropy.
 
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