Taylor Swift and Spotify have made up.
Taylor Swift is bringing her music to Spotify, and every other streaming service
She’s been gone since 2014, but she’s coming back tonight.
Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for DIRECTV
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
Sources say the music star and the music streaming service have reached a deal that will allow Spotify users to hear all of her songs, on both the free and paid versions of Spotify.
Swift’s management team announced tonight, via Twitter, that all of her music would be available to “all streaming services tonight at midnight”, which presumably means Swift’s music will also be available on other services it has been absent from, including Jay Z’s Tidal. (Update: Amazon wants you to know it also includes Amazon Music.)
But the fact that Swift had mended fences with Spotify is the most significant part of the news. Swift is one of the world’s biggest music stars, and Spotify is the world’s biggest paid streaming service, with more than 50 million subscribers, and at least another 50 million who use a free version of the service.
The fact that Spotify lets people listen to music without paying for it is the root of the dispute between Swift and Spotify.
In 2014, after writing an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal where she declared that “valuable things should be paid for,” Swift pulled her 1989 album off of Spotify, and then the rest of her catalog. It hasn’t been available on Spotify since then.
A year later, Swift got into a dust-up with Apple Music over that streaming service’s pay rates for music owners, but the two sides eventually settled, and Swift went on to strike a promotional deal with Apple.
It’s unclear what Spotify did, if anything, to change Swift’s mind.
Earlier this year Spotify struck a deal with Universal Music Group, which distributes Swift’s music, that allows Universal artists to put a short “window” on new albums, which means that only paying Spotify users can hear them.
But Spotify sources say all of Swift’s music will be available to both free and paid users, without restriction, when the songs go live later tonight.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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