Ed Sheeran Says He Owes His Career to Spotify

Music superstar Ed Sheeran has come out saying that he owes his entire career to music streaming service, Spotify. He said backstage at the BBC Music Awards “My music has been streamed 860 million times, which means that it’s getting out to people. I’m playing sold-out gigs in South America, I’ve sold out arenas in Korea and south-east Asia.” He continued “I don’t think I’d be able to do that without Spotify. For me, Spotify is not even a necessary evil. It helps me do what I want to do.”

Sheeran’s comments come after a very heated fight between the likes of Taylor Swift and Spotify, where Swift removed her entire back catalogue from Spotify a week before her new album ‘1989’ was released. With Swift reportedly romantically linked to Sheeran, this is an interesting twist. Swift told The Wall Street Journal “Music is art, and art is important and rare. Rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. It’s my opinion that music should not be free.”

When it comes to Spotify’s streaming rates, Sheeran thinks they’re fair, as he told the BBC “I think Spotify are paying the right amount.” He continued “We’re just not seeing it, because the labels aren’t making as much as they used to, so they want to keep a lot of the money that Spotify give them, and not pay it out to us. Which is the truth. It is the truth. I get a percentage of my record sales, but it’s not a large percentage. I get [the profits from] all my ticket sales, so I’d rather tour.”

That’s not all Sheeran had to say, as he finished up with “Taylor has been around for eight or nine years. She comes from an era where you do sell records – it’s only been in the past five years where it’s really deteriorated – so people buy her records and it doesn’t feel too foreign. Whereas I came through in the streaming generation. All my fans started off being students at university file-sharing my music, so it’s a different generation. She can sell records and I can get streamed, because that’s the generation I come from.”

Source: BBC.