Taylor Swift Defends Yanking Music From Spotify, Argues That Music Has Value And Should Not Be Free

Taylor Swift is standing by her decision to break up with Spotify!

The 24-year-old pop superstar made headlines for her controversial choice to remove almost all of her music from the streaming service Spotify. (Only one song from the "Hunger Games" soundtrack remains. In an interview with Yahoo! Music published on Thursday, Swift explained the move, which she describes as an effort to maintain the value of music.

"If I had streamed the new album, it's impossible to try to speculate what would have happened," Swift told the news source. "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."

Swift is not the first artist to keep her music from the streaming site. Stars like Beyoncé's 2013 surprise self-titled album is not available on Spotify, nor are the last two albums from The Black Keys.

Radiohead's frontman Thom Yorke famously yanked all of his music from Spotify last year. He tweeted about the decision, stating, "Make no mistake, new artists you discover on Spotify will not get paid. Meanwhile shareholders will shortly be rolling in it. Simples."

Swift, whose new album "1989" sold a record-breaking 1.3 million copies in the first week after its release, initially put her single "Shake It Off" on Spotify. However, she soon regretted that decision.   

"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."

Although Spotify created a special playlist dedicated to Swift in a bid to convince her to return, it appears the pop star will not back down from her stance.

The young singer, whose impressive career is sure to be an inspiration for other aspiring artists, explained that she doesn't want her legacy in music to be comprised of random singles, but instead full, cohesive albums.  

"I'd rather be known for a collection of songs that go together and live together and belong together," said Swift. "These are essentially installments of my life, two years at a time, and I work really hard to make sure that those installments are good enough to also apply to other people's lives in two-year periods of time. I'm so proud of my fans for going out there, over a million strong, and proving that albums still matter to them and that art is still viable to them."

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