The issue of music streaming just won’t go away.
Returning with perhaps the year’s biggest albums, Taylor Swift decided to delay placing ‘1989’ on popular streaming service Spotify.
In interviews, the American artist asserted that music should be valued, and that she didn’t want her project to be associated with “an experiment”.
Since then, though, ‘1989’ has appeared on the premium edition of another streaming service – Google’s YouTube Music Key platform.
Posting a note on Facebook, Billy Bragg expressed his dis-pleasure with the seemingly contradictory movements of Taylor Swift.
The singer wrote: “What a shame that Taylor Swift’s principled stand against those who would give her music away for free has turned out to be nothing more than a corporate power play. On pulling her music from Spotify recently, she made a big issue of the fact that the majority of the streaming service’s users listen to her tracks for nothing rather than signing up to the subscription service.”
“These worthy sentiments have been somewhat undermined by Swift making her new album and back catalogue available on Google’s new Music Key streaming service… which also offers listeners a free service alongside a premium subscription tier,” he continued. “She should just be honest with her fans and say, ‘Sorry, but Sergey Brin gave me a huge amount of money to be the headline name on the marquee for the launch of YouTube Music Key and so I’ve sold my soul to Google'”.
Finishing, Billy Bragg ended with one final plea to Taylor Swift: “Please don’t try to sell this corporate power play to us as some sort of altruistic gesture in solidarity with struggling music makers.”
In response, a spokesperson for Taylor Swift offered the following statement: “Taylor Swift has had absolutely no discussion or agreement of any kind with Google’s new music streaming service.”
UPDATE
Billy Bragg has posted a further statement, clarifying his links to Spotify. The singer records a regular radio show for the service, but explains that he does not receive a fee for doing this – check out the full statement HERE.
