By BEN SISARIO
November 5, 2014
Taylor Swift has proved herself a music phenomenon on more than one front, scoring the fastest-selling album in 12 years and adding new fire to the industry debate on streaming music.
Ms. Swift’s latest album, “1989,” released on Oct. 27, sold 1.287 million copies in the United States in its first week, according to Nielsen SoundScan, sending it to the top of Billboard’s latest chart. It is Ms. Swift’s fourth album in the No. 1 spot.
The album has instantly become the best-selling new title so far this year, and its sales week was the biggest since Eminem’s “The Eminem Show” moved 1.322 million copies in 2002, a time when album sales over all were more than double what they are today. Ms. Swift, 24, is also the only act to have three albums each sell one million copies in a week, at least since SoundScan began tracking retail music sales in 1991.
Those rare accomplishments are being celebrated by a music world starved for good news. Yet “1989” has also taken center stage in the industry’s continuing policy wars over the value of streaming services like Spotify, which are growing quickly but have been frequent targets of complaints from artists over royalty rates.
In the past, Ms. Swift has employed a “windowing” strategy for streaming services, withholding new material for a while to spur CD and download sales; Adele, Coldplay and Beyoncé have done the same. With “1989,” however, Ms. Swift and her label, Big Machine, went further, removing her entire catalog from Spotify and putting the streaming service on the defensive.
The dispute with Spotify — whose pitch to subscribers is largely based on its ability to deliver the music people want to hear — appeared to have arisen from a disagreement over how her music would be offered there. Spotify has both free and paid tiers, and Ms. Swift and her label wanted access to her music restricted to its paid version, which provides higher royalty rates.
Spotify denied this request, so last week, Big Machine asked to have her entire catalog taken down, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions who were granted anonymity because the talks were private. In a statement this week, Spotify defended its business model and said that Ms. Swift was welcome to return.
Spotify is the most popular subscription service, with 40 million users around the world, a fourth of whom pay for monthly plans. (The rest get advertising along with their music.)
Other streaming outlets like Rhapsody, Rdio, Beats Music and Google Play Music All Access have kept Ms. Swift’s catalog, because they agreed to keep her music out of free tiers, or offer only paid versions. The sparring with Spotify also comes as Big Machine, based in Nashville, is reportedly exploring a sale of the label for as much as $200 million, a value highly dependent on a continuing relationship with Ms. Swift. Big Machine declined to comment.
What the success of “1989” (named for the year Ms. Swift was born) means for the wider music industry is unclear, given anemic sales of CD’s and downloads and widespread worries over whether streaming music is growing fast enough to replace lost revenue from sales. Against that backdrop, Ms. Swift’s blockbuster sales are a wild anomaly.
“This isn’t about turning the record business around,” said Lenny Beer, the editor of Hits Magazine, a mainstay of industry gossip, which was the first to note rumors of Big Machine’s sale. “This is about her. She’s the one, the magic one.”
Sales of “1989” seemed to take the music industry itself by surprise. Early sales projections, usually a way for record companies to start a hype campaign, were as low as 600,000 copies. As the release date approached, that number climbed to 800,000, then over one million. By midweek, the only question seemed to be whether sales would surpass those of Ms. Swift’s last album, “Red,” which opened with just over 1.2 million.
The new album received ecstatic reviews, and its first single, “Shake It Off,” went to No. 1 on pop radio and became a hit on online video. The publicity campaign for “1989” was expansive and expertly orchestrated, with a blitz of television and radio appearances and advertising support from Target and Diet Coke.
But the most effective piece of promotion may have been Ms. Swift’s own deft command of social media. On Twitter and Instagram, she excels as an authentic personality who establishes direct connections with her audience by doing things like reposting images of fans holding copies of her album, said Matt Britton, chief executive of MRY, a youth marketing agency that is part of the Publicis Groupe, the global advertising giant.
“She has been able to take one person and spread herself out into millions of itty-bitty pieces of Taylor Swift and touch as many people as possible,” Mr. Britton said. “When you do that, you generate a kind of advocacy and excitement that no level of advertising could.”
That kind of engagement may inspire just as much loyalty in her fans as her music does, a valuable lesson for the music industry at large.
Claire Thompson, a 30-year-old entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, said that she pre-ordered “1989” from iTunes as soon as it was available, and that it was the first album she could remember buying since Beyoncé’s self-titled album last year. She also said that she follows Ms. Swift closely on Instagram and likes the way “she pops up like all my other friends do — Dana’s at the Giants game, Taylor’s at the Knicks game.”
“It makes you as a fan feel like you’re a part of her life,” she added. “We all feel that if we met her, we would be friends. You feel connected to her. It’s nice to feel that.”
