It’s been a bad week for music streaming service Spotify.
Just days after Taylor Swift’s record label pulled the singer’s entire music catalog off of the streaming service, at least two other artists are following her lead.
According to Rolling Stone, Big Machine Label Group have wiped most of country crooners Justin Moore and Brantley Gilbert’s music catalogs off of Spotify.
Spotify users searching for Brantley Gilbert’s bestselling album, Just As I Am, are now greeted with the following message: “The artist or their representatives have decided not to release this album on Spotify. We are working on it and hope they will change their mind soon.”
Meanwhile, Justin Moore’s album, Off the Beaten Path, is also unavailable on the streaming service. Just one song from the album, “Point at You,” remains.
Rolling Stone also points out that Garth Brooks’ comeback album, Man Against Machine, has never been available on Spotify; Brooks is reportedly notoriously anti-music streaming services, and launched his own online music download store this week, called GhostTunes, for fans who want to download his music.
Spotify and other music streaming services have come under fire recently over what artists and labels claim is an unfair compensation model; artists, and by extension, labels, generally only receive a fraction of a cent every time a song is streamed.
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has sought to defend Spotify from critics, claiming in a recent statement that the service has already “paid more than $2 billion to labels, publishers, and collecting societies for distribution to songwriters and recording artists.”
“We’re trying to build a new music economy that works for artists in a way the music industry never has before,” Ek said in the statement, issued after Taylor Swift’s material was pulled from Spotify. “And it is working — Spotify is the single biggest driver of growth in the music industry, the number one source of increasing revenue, and the first or second biggest source of overall music revenue in many places. Those are facts.”
Taylor Swift told Yahoo she feels that Spotify is a “grand experiment,” one that she does not want to participate in.
“I’m not willing to contribute my life’s work to an experiment that I don’t feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music,” Swift explained. “And I just don’t agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free.”
Swift is far from the first artist to publicly bash the streaming service. In 2013, Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke called streaming services in general “the last gasp” of a dying music industry.
“I feel like as musicians we need to fight the Spotify thing,” Yorke told Mexico’s Sopitas.com. “I feel that in some ways what’s happening in the mainstream is the last gasp of the old industry… to me this isn’t the mainstream, this is like the last fart, the last desperate fart of a dying corpse. What happens next is the important part.”
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