Taylor Swift doesn't like free music. Or, at least, she doesn't seem to subscribe to the theory that music should just be a free thing one gets to listen to with no strings attached—at least not in the digital world.
She already removed her music from Spotify, and the latest to get the cold shoulder from Ms. Swift is YouTube Music Key, which - like Spotify - will offer paid and premium streaming.
Earlier this week, singer-songwriter Billy Bragg said on Facebook that Swift's music catalogue was available on Music Key, something Google itself confirmed to The Guardian. To Bragg, the move meant that Swift had "sold her soul to Google," he wrote.
Later, however, Google told the paper that Swift's music would not be accessible on Music Key, and that it was only available as an internal demo shown to journalists before launch.
"Taylor Swift has had absolutely no discussion or agreement of any kind with Google's new music streaming service," one of Swift's reps told Digital Spy.
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Bragg later apologized. "Learning that Google were using Swift to promote Music Key gave me the impression that her music was going to be front and center of their launch, the implication being that her Spotify boycott was a corporate power play, rather than an attempt by an artist to make the point that music has value," he wrote.
"I now realize that I was mistaken in this assumption and wish to apologise to Ms Swift for questioning her motives."
Swift recently told Yahoo Music that Spotify feels "a bit like a grand experiment. And I'm not willing 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."
Spotify hit back at that with a blog post that explained how it compensates artists, but Swift has thus far been unmoved.
For more, check out Why Music Should Not Be Free and the video below.