Summary Of The Controversy 'Spotify'

In 2015, Taylor Swift shocked the music industry by removing all of her songs from the overwhelmingly popular streaming service, Spotify. This was a bold protest towards streaming sites, causing quite the controversy, and leaving many asking if streaming is actually good for music. Streaming is the newest way to listen to music and has become excessively supported. With streaming users pay a monthly subscription fee that gains them unlimited access to all the music available on the service. All of the music is “in the cloud,” thus leading to a huge drop in physical sales in the past years. The most popular of these streaming services is Spotify, with 20 million paying subscribers as of June, 2015 (Spotify Team). Spotify and other streaming

Musicians by the dozen were suddenly dropped by their labels and they didn’t know why, but then the artists realized, streaming was causing fewer and fewer sales and digital downloads everyday. BBC News quotes Lucy Rose, a British singer-songwriter, “I feel like it's getting harder and harder to survive in the music industry and to get established in any way. Not as many people are buying records as they used to, which makes things a lot harder for us. Because if people don't buy my record... I will get dropped by my label” (Is Streaming Good For Music?). The sad truth is that record labels have gone from supporting and promoting 20 artists a year to four or five because of sales, which is unfortunate because it has made the process for indie bands and labels making it in this new market highly competitive and challenging. No longer are the live shows and 7-inch singles running the industry, it’s the stream count and twitter fan base giving artists far fewer opportunities for promotion and

30 years ago if you wanted to buy a record or discover new music you would go to the record shop, possibly even spend hours in there searching for and listening to albums until you decide on which one to buy; you would get a physical record that you could hold in your hand, and spend the next week listening to it non-stop. Nowadays you just pull up anything on your phone, and listen to a music throughout your day. Lars Ulrich is quoted saying, “Nowadays music, to an extent, for some people it's become kind of background noise” (Is Streaming Good for Music?). He’s right, the hard truth is music is now undervalued and just thought of for many people as something to help them get through a morning car ride. Music is art and should be praised that