Two years ago, Taylor Swift wrote a now-famous op-ed in The Wall Street Journal where she explained her stance against free streaming services like Spotify, giving a searing thesis statement for the fragile state of the music economy in the 21st century: “Valuable things should be paid for. It’s my opinion that music should not be free.” A few months later, when she released 1989, Swift decided to withhold it from Spotify; just days afterwards, she (very publicly) pulled her entire discography from the service. When Apple Music launched on June 30, 2015, Swift made her catalog available for streaming again—but not before calling out Apple Music for planning to not pay artist and songwriter royalties during the service’s initial three-month free trial (a policy the tech giant reversed within hours of Swift’s note).
Swift’s public battle with streaming services is just one of many similar stories that have played out in the media in recent years, as the complicated economy of free streaming has become clear. But in many cases, the big-name artists who have taken stands against these services—Spotify chief among them, given that its basic membership is free—have backtracked in a sense, eventually allowing their music to be available there. Take, for example, the recent uploads of Adele’s 25and Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool to Spotify. Both Adele and Thom Yorke have made their qualms with the service’s business model known—Yorke once called Spotify “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse,” Adele was more subdued—and did not allow either album to be streamed there upon initial release; and both eventually ceded.
This disjunction between release dates is known as “windowing,” and it’s become the norm as the music industry not only navigates the moral implications of giving art away, but—let’s be real—also strategizes which combination of physical and streaming release dates will generate the most money. The truth is, artists at the highest echelons of popularity do stand to gain more sales-wise by initially withholding from streaming.
To be fair, these matters are constantly shifting as streaming evolves, and thus are ripe for reevaluation by artists. The Black Keys remain loudly anti-Spotify, but their recent albums eventually made it to Tidal and Apple Music, both of which are not freemium services like Spotify; likewise, A Moon Shaped Pool debuted on those paid services during week of release, which is why it’s not included in our infographic below. The bigger the artist, the more leverage they have to negotiate specific deals with streaming services, whose royalty rates vary.
With streaming still a relatively new phenomenon in music, there’s no set precedent (yet) for how this stuff works. So we crunched the numbers between release dates and streaming release dates (in America), on some big albums that notably did not make it to streaming upon release.*—Kevin Lozano and Jillian Mapes; infographic by Jojo Sounthone
*In the case of “In Rainbows,” free streaming (besides YouTube) was years away from reaching the States when the album was released as a pay-what-you-will download in 2007. But given Yorke’s strong stand against streaming, we thought it interesting to note the shift, which coincided with Apple Music’s launch.