Taylor Swift recently received a lot of media attention for pulling her music off Spotify. I am not going to comment specifically on Swift’s decision for pulling the music but I would like to take a look at the following quote from Swift in an interview with Yahoo:
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.’ Taylor Swift
Comparing physical art with digital art in this way is like comparing apples and skyscrapers. Does Swift really think that vandalizing and stealing part of a painting is the same as streaming a song? I hope not. The painting is a physical object and it is unique. The bits and bytes of a song are not unique. If I rip off the corner of your painting, it is not the same painting anymore. If I stream your song on Spotify, the song is still the same. If your painting is stolen, you do not have it anymore. If I copy your song, we both have the same song.
A digital copy is a perfect copy — identical to the original. Analogies like Swift’s convey the wrong message about streaming and it sounds very similar to the old music industry slogan that “copying is stealing”. But let’s be perfectly clear about something: Copying is not stealing.
Copying, pirating, streaming or whatever might or might not be a bad thing but we can and should not use physical analogies to describe the act of copying or streaming. It is very disappointing that Taylor Swift is perpetuating the traditional discourse of the industry when talking about digital art.