Taylor Swift: 'Music Should Not Be Free’

Taylor Swift has declared her thoughts on the future of the music industry in opinion piece written for Wall Street Journal. She wrote: “It's my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album's price point is," she wrote.

"In my opinion, the value of an album is, and will continue to be, based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work, and the financial value that artists (and their labels) place on their music when it goes out into the marketplace.

"Piracy, file sharing and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically, and every artist has handled this blow differently."

"My hope for the future, not just in the music industry, but in every young girl I meet… is that they all realise their worth and ask for it."

The star also used the article as a chance to talk about people's obsession with musicians' private lives.

"There will always be an increasing fixation on the private lives of musicians, especially the younger ones," she wrote.

"Artists who were at their commercial peak in the '70s, '80s and '90s tell me, 'It was never this crazy for us back then!'

"And I suspect I'll be saying that same thing to younger artists someday (God help them).

"There continues to be a bad girl vs. good girl/clean-cut vs. sexy debate, and for as long as those labels exist, I just hope there will be contenders on both sides. Everyone needs someone to relate to."

Watch the video for Taylor Swift's 'I Knew You Were Trouble' now:

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