Tay Tay’s argument against putting her music on streaming platform Spotify is flawed, Spotify investor and music manager Troy Carter said during TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco.
During an article Swift penned for The Wall Street Journal, Tay Tay wrote that freemium models were destroying the music business:
“Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. 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. I hope they don’t underestimate themselves or undervalue their art.”
Carter commented on Swift’s argument:
“I think Taylor is brilliant, but I think it’s sort of a flawed argument because the alternative is piracy. People already have a free option by going on YouTube and listening to the music on YouTube. So I think when you look at a service like Spotify, we know the freemium model actually works to convert users to a paying model.”
Troy Carter on Taylor Swift, piracy and streaming models that work #TCDisrupt http://t.co/xlZqjOfSKz
— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) September 23, 2015
“I do think we have to be patient and move as many people to streaming as possible,” Carter said. “Right now we’re talking about 50 million users on the streaming service but when we have 500 million to a billion users, then the unit economics start to add up at that point.”
There’s been no response from Tay Tay about Carter’s statement.
