Spotify debate: Why Taylor Swift needs to "Shake It Off"

Singer Taylor Swift made headlines in late 2014 for pulling her discography off of the music-streaming platform, Spotify.

“I think there should be an inherent value placed on art,” Swift said in an interview with Time. “I didn’t see that happening, perception-wise, when I put my music on Spotify.”

Swift went onto say that the diminishing numbers of album sales is because no artists are changing the way they put out music and, instead, immediately run to stream their music on platforms like Spotify.

In the interview with Time, Swift is adamant to place importance on the value of her art, instead of the actual money she would receive from it. There is, of course, merit in her statements. We all wish to be valued for the content, information, art, or whatever we contribute to the world, so much so that people would pay for our contributions.

Although she has merit, a flaw in her argument would be that value doesn’t always equate to money. Even though people are paying less or sometimes not at all for music does not mean that they are not listening, especially to an artist as big as Swift with millions of fans worldwide.

Which brings me to my next point: undiscovered musicians. To an artist as big as Swift, sure, it’s no problem to take your music off of Spotify. There will still be about 1.2 million people that pay for your work in its debut week, no less.

However, for the smaller and relatively unknown artists, Spotify is a great way to get your music heard. One could argue that there are still platforms like YouTube, MySpace Music, Twitter, Tumblr to reach new fans. In response to this argument, technology and social media is always changing, so there is always a new way to reach people, and Spotify happens to be one of the latest. Instead of illegally downloading from these social networks, all artists get to expose fans to their music on the service made for music and get 70 percent, said Spotify CEO David Ek, according to a NY Daily News article. 

Spotify is also victory for the music lover. Name another app or platform where one can easily access most of one’s favorite music? For students, Spotify offers a 50 percent off discount, which means all the music on Spotify available to stream and download at half the price with no advertisements. I, personally, think it’s worth the $5 a month.

I think rapper Hoodie Allen said it best in a tweet, “Let's stop pretending Spotify is ruining the music industry in a world where people charge $500 for group picture meet [and] greets…”