Taylor Swift addresses Spotify exit

NEW YORK, Nov. 6 (UPI) -- Taylor Swift explained her reasons for removing her entire music collection from Spotify while discussing the commercial success of her new album 1989 with Yahoo.

Swift's fifth, and first official pop, album was released on Oct. 27 and sold 1.287 million copies during its first week, becoming the first album to go platinum in 2014 and making the singer the first act ever to have three consecutive albums sell over 1 million copies.

While speaking of her record-breaking album, the 24-year-old singer told Yahoo she didn't stream 1989 because it would've been "impossible to try to speculate what would have happened."

"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. 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."

Swift went on to reference the op-ed she wrote for the Wall Street Journal earlier this year where she asserted that "music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for," and said she tries to keep an open mind when it comes to the evolution of music.

"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," she said of the current music-streaming model.

"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.' 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."

Swift joins the likes of Garth Brooks, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and Tool in her decision to break up with Spotify, a streaming service that pays artist between $0.006 and $0.0084 per play.