Taylor Swift's latest album 1989 knocked Hozier off the top of the Irish album chart last week, but if you open music streaming service Spotify you won’t be able to find it.
Instead you will see the songs listed but blacked out, and a note saying: “The artist or their representatives have decided not to release this album on Spotify. We are working on it and hope that they will change their mind soon.”
Their negotiations clearly didn't go too well because this afternoon, Ms Swift pulled all her music from Spotify's app.
The singer wrote extensively about the future of the music industry and the relationship between making her art accessible and being rewarded for it. She wrote: “In my opinion, the value of an album is, and will continue to be, based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work, and the financial value that artists (and their labels) place on their music when it goes out into the marketplace. Piracy, file sharing and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically, and every artist has handled this blow differently
2014 has been another awful year for music sales. 1989 was the first album to go platinum. One Direction is the only act who might repeat that feat this year.
After ten years of growth 2013 was the first year that iTune Store sales went down, they fell by 2.1 percent. The rate of that decline has accelerated and is reported to be as high as 13 percent this year. Facing total collapse record labels learned to live with streaming, the returns are far from amazing but they are better than nothing.
Every play on Spotify makes less than a cent. Most artists get less than ten percent of that money. No wonder Swift isn't a fan. To try and keep artists happy some labels like XL (Adele, Jack White, Sigur Ros) and 4AD (The National, Future Islands, Bon Iver) offer their artists 50/50 deals, giving them half of the streaming revenue. She is not alone in removing her music from streaming apps. Radiohead's Thom Yorke has also protested against legal streaming. He made headlines last year when he described labels' relationship with streaming companies “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse.”
When he released his second solo album Tomorrow's Modern Boxes in October it was not available on Spotify. He went a step further than Swift by releasing the album as a torrent. For €4.72 fans could download the album on peer-to-peer file sharing software, the same kind of program that you use to download music from Pirate Bay. This meant that the album bypassed the iTunes Store.
Radiohead previously shook up the music industry back in October 2007 when they released their album In Rainbows as a pay-what-you-want download. That album has never appeared on any streaming sites.
Indie-rockers The Black Keys have also been vocal in their criticism of music streaming - their latest album Turn Blue has never been uploaded to Spotify.
Spotify says that 70 percent of its total revenues go towards paying artists' royalties. The money paid out for roughly 140 plays on Spotify is equal to the amount labels get for one iTunes download. Monster hits like 1989's 'Shake It Off' can still net serious money for both labels and artists.
With new streaming platforms in the pipeline from both Apple and either Google or YouTube, streaming is expected to become even more popular in the next 15 months. Protests from high profile artists like Taylor Swift and Yorke can spark debate but they cannot change the tide. The industry is reluctantly embracing the format because most of their older (and richer) sources of revenue are either going or gone.
It remains to be seen whether Taylor Swift will soften her stance on legal streaming. Her last album Red was held back from Spotify when it was first released but it did show up a few months later. It was initially thought that 1989 could do the same once sales died down but the removal of her back catalogue suggests that Swift and Spotify are never (ever) getting back together.
