MIGHT TAYLOR SWIFT be pop music’s Alexander the Great? Her power in the music industry is undeniable; she has built a vast empire and amassed great riches. She is one of only two superstars who can still sell enormous amounts of music on CD . Her last tour was the second-highest-grossing of 2018. Now she is seeking to conquer a new world: streaming.Wall Street Journal
about Spotify’s unsatisfactory payments to artists, she withdrew her back catalogue from the platform. In 2015 she forced Apple to pay artists for music played during users’ three-month free trial period by threatening to pull her “1989” album. She returned her music to Spotify in June 2017, but when she released “Reputation” in November 2017 she waited three weeks before making it available to stream in order to maximise physical and download sales.
The second answer is that, even for Ms Swift, physical sales are declining . Both “1989” and “Reputation” sold more than 1m copies in America in their first week of release; but while “1989” reached 2m in three weeks, it took “Reputation” 18 weeks to reach the same total. Faced with that, it would seem foolish not to take a chance on streaming.
While many industry observers do not expect “Lover” to match the physical sales of its predecessors, it is already the biggest album of the year in the United States. Within two days “Lover” had recorded the largest first-week sales of any album since, well, “Reputation”, with around 500,000 copies sold. The album has performed well on streaming services, too.
That suggests a third reason, the Alexander the Great theory: that Ms Swift wanted to conquer streaming as she had physical music and live performance. Before now, her commercial power has not translated to dominance of streaming, a situation not helped by her albums being either unavailable for long periods of time or not available immediately on streaming platforms. In 2017, when she released “Reputation”, though she sold 2.2m albums, she chalked up only 1.
back in MY day (when music was GOOD), we had to DOWNLOAD our songs, one by one! and our earbuds had little wires on them, that we had to PLUG IN to our 'i pod'. But that's back when people respected their elders. Get off my lawn!!!