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Though it seemed upon its release that Adele‘s latest album was everywhere (and, with its fourth straight week atop the Billboard 200 albums chart, still is), the truth is that 25 has remained conspicuously absent from one very large source: music streaming services. Now Adele has gone on the record about the decision to stay off Spotify and Apple Music as she reflects on her recent mega-success in Time magazine’s cover story on the singer.
She told the magazine that “for me, all albums that come out, I’m excited about leading up to release day. I don’t use streaming. I buy my music. I download it, and I buy a physical [copy] just to make up for the fact that someone else somewhere isn’t. It’s a bit disposable, streaming.” She then waxed uncertainty at the future of streaming music, and while she acknowledged that it isn’t going away, she stated that she simply “can’t pledge allegiance to something that I don’t know how I feel about yet.”
She also took full responsibility for the gamble, suggesting she faced plenty of pressure to bend the other way.
“I’m proud of my decision,” she proclaimed. “I would have been proud even if the album flopped. I would have been proud because I stuck to my guns, and I think it’s really important as an artist that you do that.”
Adele called out Taylor Swift as a kind of comrade-in-arms against the streaming crusaders, after the 1989 artist made that album and all of her previous music unavailable on streaming, and wrote an open letter to Apple asking them to change their artist compensation policies.
“I love her — how powerful she is,” Adele said of Swift. “We’ll get lumped together now because of it, but I think we would both feel the ability to say yes or no to things even if we weren’t successful.”
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This story first appeared on billboard.com
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