UPDATE: A new report from Bloomberg claims that the album will not be available on streaming services for the first week.
See below for original story.
Taylor Swift’s new album reputation may get a delayed release on streaming services. According to a report from The New York Times, Swift and her label Big Machine Records have declined to confirm whether or not reputation will be immediately available on services like Apple Music and Spotify upon its release. It wouldn’t be an unprecedented move for Swift, who didn’t put her 2014 album 1989 on Apple Music until eight months after its release and held out on Spotify until this year.
Spotify spokesman Graham James declined to comment on whether the service would carry reputation, only saying, “Our policy is to work with artists and managers who want to work with us to connect with their millions of fans on Spotify.” The service has also declined to put Swift’s new songs on any of its high-profile playlists, increasingly an important factor in driving a song’s popularity in the streaming era. Apple Music, TIDAL, and Amazon reps declined to comment.
“I anticipate she will hold it from streaming until she hits some sales mark, and then she will revisit that decision,” Stephanie Kellar, an associate professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, told The New York Times.
Swift’s new music has been notably under-performing on Spotify, a fact that Diplo noted in an upcoming interview with Rolling Stone, part of which leaked to gossip sites. In the interview, the Mad Decent founder said:
Music is in the hands of the kids. Streaming is literally what kids want to listen to over and over again. They want to listen to ‘Rockstar’ and ‘Bodak Yellow.’ They don’t want to listen to, like, ‘Look What You Made Me Do.‘ … That music doesn’t relate to them at all. I don’t think it ever did. They were only given that by radio and marketing budgets. I’m impressed with Post Malone. I can relate to him more than Taylor Swift.
While Swifties may be upset about his comments, Diplo isn’t wrong. Younger people do love streaming—in 2016 millennials accounted for 72% of all streams on Spotify. The streaming service also makes song stats public, and their numbers reveal people are in fact streaming artists like Post Malone (and other rappers) way more than Taylor Swift.
As of Nov. 7th, the only Taylor Swift song on Spotify’s Global Top 50 is “Look What You Made Me Do” and it’s only charting at No. 48. Meanwhile, on Spotify’s US Top 50, “Call It What You Want” is at No. 37 less than a week after its release, meaning Swift’s song is less popular than French Montana’s “Unforgettable” which is at No. 34 and peaked during this past summer.
“Look What You Made Me Do” did break the record for most-streamed debut week by a female artist, but that comes with two major caveats.
One, while the Billboard charts have a long history, streaming is relatively new and it’s growing more every day. As such, records are constantly being set and broken again as the user base continues to grow. Two, after releasing albums every two years since 2006, Taylor took three full years to follow up 1989, arguably her biggest album. So, of course, the release of a song like “Look What You Made Me Do” would be met with anticipation which would drive up streams.
Either way, you can’t call “Look What You Made Me Do” a flop—it has over 200 million streams on Spotify, it debuted at No. 1, and it has already gone Platinum. However, compare the 200 million streams of “Look What You Made Me Do” to Post Malone’s “rockstar,” a song that was released three weeks after but already has over 300 million streams.
Taylor’s other recent singles, “…Ready For It?” and “Gorgeous,” have racked up 93 million and 30 million streams, respectively. Spotify’s decision not to playlist the songs could certainly be affecting these numbers, but it also seems that her music may not be connecting on streaming services the same way that it has with traditional album sales and digital downloads.
Check out The New York Times‘ full report here and read all the lyrics to Taylor Swift’s reputation singles on Genius now.
