In the era of digital music, are you still willing to pay for the music?

Pandora, Spotify… Many platforms are offering free music today. According to the latest statistics from Nielson SoundScan, in 2014, the streamed music service saw a dramatic increase of 54% and most of them are free to the users. This seems to be the trend.

However, Taylor Swift, the queen of the global music market whose new album 1989 was sold more than 8.6 million units on iTunes in 95 countries in 2014, removed her entire back catalog from Spotify last November, saying that artists should value their art and make sure that people are paying enough money for it.

YES, music needs to be paid! “[People] can still listen to my music if they get it on iTunes,” Swift told Time. “I’m always up for trying something. And I tried it and I didn’t like the way it felt. I think there should be an inherent value placed on art.

“I didn’t see that happening, perception-wise, when I put my music on Spotify. Everybody’s complaining about how music sales are shrinking, but nobody’s changing the way they’re doing things. They keep running towards streaming, which is, for the most part, what has been shrinking the numbers of paid album sales,” Taylor said.

NO, it can be free! On the contrary, Ed Sheeran has bucked the trend for criticizing Spotify, saying his popularity on the site enabled him to play three nights at Wembley Stadium. “I don’t think I’d be able to do that without Spotify,” Ed told the BBC.

“Taylor has been around for eight or nine years. She comes from an era where you do sell records – it’s only been in the past five years where it’s really deteriorated – so people buy her records and it doesn’t feel too foreign.

“Whereas I came through in the streaming generation. All my fans started off being students at university, file-sharing my music, so it’s a different generation.

“She can sell records and I can get streamed, because that’s the generation I come from.”

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