As Taylor Swift takes her music away from Spotify, Katie Wright asks whether this will set a dangerous precedent for the music streaming service.

WHEN Taylor Swift decides to do something, she doesn't do it by halves. On the eve of the release of her new album, she pulled her back catalogue from Spotify, a move which preceded huge sales.

"I'm not willing to contribute my life's work to an experiment that I don't feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music," Swift told Yahoo Music, the opening salvo in an ongoing war of words.

Her fifth album, the heartbreak-chronicling 1989 sold 1.3 million copies in its first week alone, far outstripping what Swift would have made in revenue at Spotify's rate of around £4,000 per million plays.

But in the long run, it's a mistake said Spotify's Daniel Ek in a lengthy, zealous blog post, claiming Swift would have netted something in the region of £4m a year if she'd left her albums on his "freemium" service, where paying users shell out £10 a month. Illegal downloads, on the other hand, pay nothing.

"Spotify has paid more than two billion dollars to labels, publishers and collecting societies for distribution to songwriters and recording artists," Ek wrote, saying half of that was in the last year alone. "And sure enough, if you looked at the top spot on [piracy site] The Pirate Bay last week, there was 1989..."

So which is the real Spotify - pseudo-philanthropic saviour of the music industry or evil digital overload, rubbing its hands with glee every time another helpless band hands over its discography?

In reality, it's somewhere in between.

Clearly Spotify is detrimental to artists who, like Swift, are already monumentally successful, because it dissuades fans from buying their music. However, record sales are declining the world over, as the music industry continues to battle in vain against piracy. Record labels will keep on signing up to Spotify because they'd rather earn a fraction of what they would from traditional sales, and attract more fans for their musicians, than bite the hand that feeds.

Other artists, like Coldplay, take a different approach, releasing their albums on stream later, so maybe Swift and Spotify will rekindle their relationship after some time apart.

Given her outspoken stance, though, it's doubtful.

"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 said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (which also happens to be stuck behind a paywall) back in July. "I hope they don't underestimate themselves or undervalue their art."

SINGULAR FOCUS

Move over, Cyber Monday, there's a new annual retail extravaganza day in town, and it's generating record-breaking sales in Asia. Tuesday, November 11 saw Chinese shopping giant Alibaba take 57.1 billion yuan - that's £5.9 billion - on what's become known as 'Singles' Day', the world's biggest online shopping day. Also called 'Double-11', a term trademarked by Alibaba, the 24-hour stretch is responsible for a significant proportion of the site's sales, driven by deep discounts on clothes, gadgets and other 'gifts' that singles give to themselves. More than 278 million orders were shipped, and the day also indicated how common cellphone shopping is becoming, with nearly half the orders placed on mobile devices.

THE FUTURE OF FACEBOOK

In his first ever Q&A session, Mark Zuckerberg has said he believes Facebook will be dominated by video in future. "Five years ago, most of Facebook was text, and if you fast-forward five years, probably most of it is going to be video, just because it's getting easier to capture video and the moments of your life and share it," the CEO said at the social network's California HQ, revealing his desire to build "the perfect personalised newspaper" for every user. He added: "We're trying to personalise it and show you the stuff that's going to be most interesting to you."

KEEP IT IN THE FAMILY

The "Latin lover" is making a comeback - and it's thanks to Whatsapp. That's according to a report from the Italian Association of Matrimonial Lawyers, which states that in 40 per cent of divorce cases due to adultery, messages on the app are being cited as evidence. "Lovers can now exchange risque photos of themselves and we have seen adulterers using the service to maintain three or four relationships - it's like dynamite," Gian Ettore, president of the association, told the Times. He also claimed Whatsapp is the "final straw", but given that the term "Latin lover" predates Whatsapp by several centuries, it's unlikely that shutting down the app would stem the tide of Italian divorces completely.