Taylor Swift Pulls All Her Music Off Spotify

Streaming service really wants her to come back
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Nov 3, 2014 12:03 PM CST
Taylor Swift Pulls All Her Music Off Spotify
Taylor Swift performs on ABC's "Good Morning America" in Times Square on Thursday, Oct. 30, 2014, in New York.   (Photo by Greg Allen/Invision/AP)

In the mood for some Taylor Swift? Well, don't bother heading to Spotify, because she just pulled all her music off the streaming service, in what the Verge says is probably "an attempt to drive sales of her new album, 1989, as well as her earlier albums." The latest album was never available on Spotify, but her back catalog was, and in a blog post today titled "On Taylor Swift’s Decision To Remove Her Music from Spotify," the Spotify team writes that her songs appear on more than 19 million Spotify playlists and that the company hopes "she’ll change her mind and join us in building a new music economy that works for everyone."

Swift wrote earlier this year that "piracy, file sharing, and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically," Business Insider notes, and she kept her last album off Spotify for the first few months after it was released. Mashable hypothesizes that Swift was upset after fans started asking why 1989 wasn't available on Spotify and a rep for the streaming service told Mashable last week that was due to "a decision by the artist," adding, "Taylor Swift has nearly 2 million active followers on [Spotify] who will be disappointed by this decision." (Spotify has, however, rather cheekily put together a "What To Play While Taylor’s Away" playlist to console bereft fans.) But a source tells Billboard the main motivation behind the move has to do with negotiations around a sale of Big Machine Label Group, which represents Swift; Big Machine is looking to drive up its sale price, the source says. (More Taylor Swift stories.)

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