On Monday, November 3, Taylor Swift removed all of her music from the popular music streaming service, Spotify. To many, this came as a surprise because of Spotify’s popularity and its apparent mission to bring back focus to the musicians as opposed to the producers. Swift’s reason for removing her newest album was that she stood to make more money selling her album the traditional way.

“1989,”  is thought to be the music industry’s last platinum album, as consumers switch to streaming for their musical preferences.  Spotify, however, defended its case with a blog post on November 11th from its CEO, Daniel Ek, who claimed that Swift was on track to receive $6 million from Spotify for her music. In addition, he said that Spotify has paid more than $2 billion to record labels, music publishers, and groups for their music. It’s not that $6 million is a small sum to Taylor Swift; rather, record labels take their own cut from the revenue that can leave very small paychecks for the musicians. For example, Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” was listened to 6.5 million times. Yet, in the end, Bon Jovi and his two co-writers ended up splitting $110.

This discrepancy needs to change. The music industry is going through a revolution, and it remains to be seen how artists will be compensated in the future.

Written by Dimitri Vasilkov‘15