Jason Aldean Changes His Tune About Music Streaming, Back on Spotify
Earlier this year, Jason Aldean joined forces with other huge names in the music industry in supporting an up-and-coming music service called Tidal after pulling his latest album from other streaming giant Spotify at the end of 2014. The decision was part of a movement among major artists from many genres of music to fight for what they argue to be fair pay for music streaming. Aldean joined names like Madonna, Beyoncé, and Usher in promoting Tidal, which rapper Jay Z heavily invested in during the early part of 2015.
Tidal's promise, in the eyes of the artists that supported it, is that it would offer fair financial compensation for music streaming; a battle championed by Taylor Swift. She famously pulled her music from streaming services as well, only to return to Apple Music after a brief stare-down with the company over payments for a trial period for the service.
After the decision to remove "Old Boots, New Dirt" from Spotify; Aldean explained that while he didn't want to hurt or disappoint fans, he wanted to take a stand particularly for up-and-coming artists and writers that are "getting cheated" by the small amounts of money streaming services like Spotify pay.
While Aldean's music was available to stream on Tidal (and later Apple Music), that left a big audience out of the loop. Tidal, in particular, has seen poor adoption rates and has seen a lot of criticism from skeptics that support larger, mainstream services like Spotify. This essentially left people with the choice of leaving a service they've already invested in to switch to another one, or add another service on top of what they already have in order to stream Aldean's music.
Apparently things came to a breaking point, as Aldean announced through his Facebook page yesterday that he was making a return to streaming giant Spotify. His full catalog, including "Old Boots, New Dirt" is now available once again for streaming on the service. The post outlines that artists and the music industry are still trying to figure out how streaming fits into the music industry and that he heard from fans while on his summer tour that they missed having access to his music through their favorite streaming services.