Taylor Swift Explains Why She Took All of Her Music Off Spotify

Earlier this week, Taylor Swift made a controversial decision to remove her entire catalogue from Spotify -- a move that upset many fans and critics alike. Now, T. Swift --who just sold more than one million copes of '1989' in its first week -- is speaking out about her much-talked about choice.

"If I had streamed the new album, it's impossible to try to speculate what would have happened. But all I can say is that music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment," Taylor explained to Yahoo! "And I'm not wiling to contribute my life's work to an experiment that I don't feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music. And I just don't agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free."

It's the same sentiment that Taylor eloquently touched on in her Wall Street Journal op-ed, writing at the time: “Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for." In fact, Taylor referenced her WSJ piece in her interview with Yahoo!, revealing:

"I wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal this summer that basically portrayed my views on this. I try to stay really open-minded about things, because I do think it's important to be a part of progress," she continued. "But I think it's really still up for debate whether this is actual progress, or whether this is taking the word 'music' out of the music industry."

Still, Taylor gave it the ole' college try, choosing to create her own experiment by releasing 'Shake It Off' on the streaming site.

"…A lot of people were suggesting to me that I try putting new music on Spotify with 'Shake It Off,' and so I was open-minded about it. I thought, 'I will try this; I'll see how it feels,'" she admitted. "It didn't feel right to me. I felt like I was saying to my fans, 'If you create music someday, if you create a painting someday, someone can just walk into a museum, take it off the wall, rip off a corner off it, and it's theirs now and they don't have to pay for it.' I didn't like the perception that it was putting forth. And so I decided to change the way I was doing things."

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