LOS ANGELES • Taylor Swift got back together with Spotify at midnight last Friday, releasing all her music on streaming services at the same time that her nemesis, Katy Perry, dropped her new album.
Swift, one of the world's best-selling pop stars, also made her music available on Pandora, Amazon Music and Tidal, her management team said. Her catalogue had previously been available only on Apple Music.
Her management said the latest decision to return to all streaming services was taken to celebrate her 2014 album, 1989, selling more than 10 million copies worldwide. "Taylor wants to thank her fans by making her entire back catalogue available to all streaming services at midnight," her management's Instagram account, Taylor Nation, said last Thursday.
Swift, 27, had been notoriously anti-streaming since she pulled all her music off Spotify in November 2014, after writing an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal saying: "Valuable things should be paid for. It's my opinion that music should not be free."
Six months later, she struck a deal with Apple Music on 1989, after Apple bowed to pressure and agreed to pay artists during a free trial of its new music-streaming service.
She has no new album to promote. Her latest move coincided with the release at midnight last Friday of Witness, Perry's new album, and followed on the heels of Perry's press tour, in which she spilled the details of her feud with Swift.
In 2014, Swift told Rolling Stone magazine that her song Bad Blood was about a female singer who tried to sabotage an arena tour. Fans put two and two together, since some of Swift's backup dancers left her tour to join Perry.
In the past month, Perry has addressed the situation with Entertainment Weekly; blamed Swift for the feud during Carpool Karaoke with talk-show host James Corden; and, in a new interview with NME.com, said Swift tried to "assassinate my character".
Then there is Perry's new single Swish Swish, which appears to be a shot back at Swift. Perry has told talkshow host Jimmy Fallon that the song is "a great anthem for people to use whenever somebody's trying to hold you down or bully you".
REUTERS, WASHINGTON POST
