Taylor Swift has pulled her entire album catalog from music streaming service Spotify.
Since its October 27 release, Swift has refused to put her new album "1989" on the digital music website. This isn't the first time the 24 year-old artist has refused to release an album with the online streaming service. In 2012 her album "Red" was not available for several months on Spotify.
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It's not unheard of for artists or their record companies to withhold albums from streaming sites for a limited time in order to boost album sales. The strategy known as "windowing" is common with digital releases, but is not well-received by services like Spotify.
"We hope she'll change her mind and join us in building a new music economy that works for everyone," Spotify said in a statement. "We believe fans should be able to listen to music wherever and whenever they want, and that artists have an absolute right to be paid for their work and protected from piracy. That's why we pay nearly 70 percent of our revenue back to the music community."
The company reported in 2013 that it pays an average of $0.007 per play to artists, not nearly as much as would be made selling on services like Apple iTunes.
In a recent op-ed with The Wall Street Journal, Swift said: "Piracy, file sharing and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically...Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. It's my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album's price point is. I hope they don't underestimate themselves or undervalue their art."
