In an interview with TIME magazine, the pop superstar also discusses critics who believe she doesn't write her own songs.
- Nov 14, 2014
AceShowbiz - Taylor Swift once again explains her decision to leave Spotify. The country-turned-pop superstar, who graces the cover of TIME's December edition, says in an accompanying interview with the magazine that she first put her music on the service because she's "always up for trying something."
"And I tried it and I didn't like the way it felt," the "Shake It Off" singer explains. "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," she continues.
Swift removed her music from Spotify just a week after putting out her latest album "1989", which opened with nearly 1.3 million copies. Her songs, however, are still available for stream on other services like Beats Music and Rhapsody which require users 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," she says.
In the interview with TIME, Swift also discusses critics who believe she doesn't write her own songs. "It's a feminist issue," she tells the magazine. "My friend [Ed Sheeran], no one questions whether he writes everything. In the beginning, I liked to think that we were all on the same playing field. And then it became pretty obvious to me that when you have people sort of questioning the validity of a female songwriter, or making it seem like it's somehow unacceptable to write songs about your real emotions - that it somehow makes you irrational and overemotional - seeing that over the years changed my view."
"It's a little discouraging that females have to work so much harder to prove that they do their own things. I see Nicki Minaj and Iggy Azalea having to prove that they write their own raps or their own lyrics, and it makes me sad, because they shouldn't have to justify it," she adds.
