Taylor Swift’s decision not to release her new album “Reputation” on streaming services like Spotify will drive people back to piracy, Troy Carter, global head of Spotify’s creator services, said Monday morning at the Internet Association’s Virtuous Circle Summit. “A lot of it is being pirated,” he said. “That sets the industry back a little bit.”
However, Carter also said that he understood Swift’s decision: “Taylor is super smart. We’re not mad at her for her decision,” he said. Swift and Adele, who sold millions of copies of their album “25” while waiting seven months to release it on streaming services, are among the few artists who can keep an album off such platforms without significantly affecting its exposure.
Carter, who managed artists such as Lady Gaga and Meghan Trainor before joining Spotify in 2016, was also critical of the music industry’s previous business model. “We’ve been screwing consumers for years,” he said, arguing that for years consumers were forced to buy high-priced albums that only contained one or two songs they wanted. Carter drew a direct connection between this attitude and exclusive rights on streaming services.
Some of the service’s competitors have long tried to gain market share with exclusive or delayed releases, but Spotify has been bucking that trend for years. “We just felt it wasn’t a great experience for the consumer,” he said. In addition, Carter argued that artists also have no interest in limiting their albums to a subset of their audience that happens to be subscribed to a particular service. “That’s bad for consumers, bad for artists, bad for the music business.”
Carter extended his criticism to modern radio. “Radio has become a place so driven by fear, research and advertising that it has forgotten the consumer,” he said. “They only want to play songs that are already hits.” Ultimately, this would lead to a generational divide, with younger listeners only using streaming services and YouTube and avoiding radio altogether.
But Carter also warned that the music industry should not take streaming’s success for granted: Although he didn’t say so explicitly, Spotify is among the services that are likely many years away from profitability. “The music industry is celebrating at the one-yard line right now,” he said. “That scares me.”
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