“Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for,” Taylor Swift wrote in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal July 4, 2014. Four months later, Swift pulled all her music from popular streaming site Spotify.
Swift is not the first artist to make this move; in fact, Radiohead and Atoms for Peace front man Thom Yorke expressed his distaste of the music streaming business in early 2013 by removing two of his albums from Spotify.
“These people get involved, [like] Spotify, who try to be…gatekeepers of this whole process, when we do not need to do that. No artist needs that, we can do all that ourselves,” Yorke told Spanish news outlet Sopitas.com.
While Swift may not have been the first to make a move, her public statements have spurred other artists to be more openly skeptical of the streaming industry. Swift’s comments spurred other artists Brantley Gilbert, Justin Moore and Jason Aldean to remove their music from Spotify.
Some students find these efforts fruitless in the face of technological advances.
“If somebody wanted to listen to her music, they could just go on YouTube and listen to it anywhere,” an anonymous senior said. “I don’t see a point in her taking her stuff off of Spotify.”
Still, Swift maintains her position on this topic, and other students, while they may not agree with her, say they understand what she is trying to do.
“I think she was making more of statement than anything,” senior Greg Zakaria said. “I don’t think it was all about [Spotify] as much as it was just the idea of streaming music. Most kids illegally download her music anyway, so what’s the point?”
– By Sawyer Davis