Taylor Swift's prompt (and very public) breakup with Spotify made the news because, well, she's Taylor Swift and she made a valid point about the music industry. Many lauded what she did but Billy Bragg is not a fan, calling her out for "selling her soul to Google."
What's Google got to do with Swift and Spotify?
Bragg is not convinced that Swift's intentions are pure about taking away all her music from Spotify. This is because while she said she's doing it because she doesn't believe in the idea that music should be doled out for free, it appears that Swift is simply dumping one streaming service for another, what with some of her music appearing on Music Key, YouTube's new subscription service.
Google owns YouTube -- that's why it got dragged into the picture when Bragg wrote a scathing post on Facebook about Swift.
"If Ms. Swift was truly concerned about perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free, she should be removing her material from YouTube, not cozying up to it," wrote Bragg.
He adds that as the biggest streaming service by default in the world, where all sorts of content are made available for free, YouTube is the biggest threat there is to commercial streaming services.
Representatives of Swift have denied Bragg's accusations.
"Taylor Swift has had absolutely no discussion or agreement of any kind with Google's new music streaming service," they said in a statement to NME.
Music Key is currently on beta release and is being made available to YouTube users in the United States and some countries in Europe. Select invites have been sent out but those who are subscribed to Google Music are automatically given access to YouTube's subscription service. Access to Music Key costs $7.99 a month, but users will only be billed starting Jan 3, when they accept the invite.
What makes Music Key different? There's the fact that it's offering videos instead of just music. Other than that, it's very much like Spotify in that paid subscribers can watch videos without ads and download these videos, allowing them to enjoy their favorite videos offline. Another nifty feature is background listening. As it implies, it lets users put videos on the background without keeping displays on so they can listen to music on their devices.
