This week, Taylor Swift’s latest album 1989 went platinum. It’s the one and only album that has done that in 2014. In fact, it was the fastest selling album in a week since Eminem’s blistering 2002 release The Eminem Show.
Also, separately, everyone just freaked out because Swift’s music was pulled from Spotify. ERMAGERD. WORLD CRISIS. EBOLA? FUCK THAT. SWIFT LEFT SPOTIFY!
Let’s break it down.
Fact 1: Taylor Swift removes music off Spotify, a FREE streaming service
Fact 2: Taylor Swift’s album went platinum
Fact 3: If her music was on Spotify, a MUCH smaller number of people would have bought it.
There you go. Mystery fucking solved.
Swift went on to say that “music should not be free,” which is interesting too, but I’ll save that for another rant. (and this)
I’m not sure why everyone is up in arms about the fact that albums aren’t going platinum anymore. Considering the direction that the music industry has been heading in for the better part of a decade, it should come as no surprise.
Album sales don’t bring in anywhere near as much income as they used to (unless of course you’re Taylor Swift) but this isn’t shocking or new. Artists, labels, publicists, touring agencies and more have all dramatically shifted their roles within the music industry. They’ve made contingency plans.
In case you hadn’t noticed, bands are constantly on tour these days, because that’s where they make their money. We all use streaming services, many of us illegally download and even the legal downloads cost a fraction of what CDs used to. Where we spend money is on concerts: tickets, merch, etc. So why is it a big deal that albums aren’t going platinum? Surely a better judge of a band’s financial success would be to look at their tour earnings.
Alt-J are touring Australia three times in eight months!
I don’t understand the phenomenon that is Taylor Swift. I can understand Bieber fever. I can understand One Direction. I was a pre-teen girl once, after all. I can understand Beyonce and Katy Perry and all that. But Taylor Swift?
Quite simply, she and her music is BORING. BORING BORING BOR-ZZZZZZZ sorry I fell asleep even just thinking about it. She doesn’t need to be provocative or controversial in order to be interesting. There’s other options, you know.
Apparently, she prides herself on the fact that she is boring and lame and uninteresting. SMH recently described her as “refreshingly prim and proper.”
I’m sorry, refreshingly prim and proper? Seriously? Fuck, she’s so starched, so stifled. She’s so dry that you need to listen to her in the rain.
Her music, like that of Ed Sheeran, Vance Joy and like John Mayer and James Blunt before them, is so brain-numbingly bland and sleep-inducing that the only reason I can justify them being so rich and popular is that they are actually the cure for insomnia.
Looks like someone played 1989 to this little ducky
Anyway, I just don’t get it. I don’t get why she’s so popular or why people don’t understand an incredibly clear marketing technique such as removing music from a free service, in order to make people pay for it.
Good modern pop:
More good modern pop:
More good modern pop:
Okay now listen to this and tell me you don’t fall asleep.