Spotify needs a swift response to Taylor move

London: Taylor Swift’s new album, 1989 — named for the year of her birth — is enjoying some remarkable numbers. Since the start of the week it has sold 1.3 million copies, almost a quarter of all LPs bought in the US.

It was 2002 when an album last sold so well in its first week. Back then, the exultant 24-year-old tweeted to her 46.3 million followers, she “was 12, and going through my ‘braids phase’”. Proof of the fashion mis-step came with an attached Instagram photo.

As well as sending out pictures of herself to the Taylor Nation, as her fans are collectively known, Swift also found time for a brutal power play. Last week she yanked not just 1989 but also her previous four albums from Spotify, which has reacted like one of the jilted boyfriends in her songs, pleading for a second chance. The singer was one of the top attractions on the Swedish streaming music service.

It is the latest skirmish in the record industry’s long war to survive in the digital economy. The context is a precipitous decline in album sales, the chief source of revenue for the business. Swift’s new release is the first album to sell one million copies this year. Contrast that with 1989, a year when every album that reached number one on the US charts sold at least that many.

Swift’s sales figures are a throwback to that era. So is her attitude to record industry economics. “It’s my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album’s price point is,” she wrote in The Wall Street Journal this year.

Her rejection of Spotify and its 40 million users has been dismissed as hopelessly retrograde. Does she not realise the album is going the way of sheet music? Is she aware that streaming revenues are beginning to rival those from download services such as iTunes, where users buy a few tracks outright instead of renting access to a huge library?

The words from one of her songs may come back to haunt her: “Well, maybe it’s and my blind optimism to blame.”

She released her first album at 16: it reached the US top five. She began in country music, signed to an independent Nashville record label and, although the emphasis has shifted to pop as her fame has grown, she retains the Nashville temperament. Her image is wholesome and good-humoured. She has the rare gift of enjoying fame without being spoilt by it.

When she bought a New York apartment this year for a reported $15 million (Dh55 million) she also bought one opposite, at a cost of $5 million, for her security staff — ex-Marines who treat her outings like public walk-abouts by a head of state.

Alongside the personable demeanour is a canny mind for business. As an 11-year-old she decided the best way to get exposure was to sing the National Anthem at sporting events. At one she impressed Britney Spears’ then manager so much he briefly signed her up.

There is no reason to suppose the Spotify action is any less shrewd. By attacking the concept of free music the singer, born shortly after the Berlin Wall came down, is anticipating a new era of internet paywalls. Access to premium content — Swift prefers to call it “art” — will require a fee.

The argument is not so much about the pricing of albums as the pricing of music.

The dangers lie on Spotify’s side. Swift has set a precedent. Other A-listers may feel they, too, must prove they are bigger than the streaming service by leaving it.

Until the likes of Spotify and iTunes are able to break new talent they will remain dependent on record labels. Having reacted to the onset of the digital age in the manner of panicking Mafiosi, the labels are trying to undo past blunders, finding ways to accommodate the tech upstarts or push back against them.

Swift is taking the latter approach. She is gambling that Spotify needs her more than she needs it.

The leader of the Taylor Nation, a global community bigger than Spain, is surely right. An era of protectionism is dawning. For pop’s top names, the days of music being distributed for free are set to go the way of Swift’s braids.

— Financial Times