Taylor Swift said that she did not like the idea of giving out her music for free and explained her decision to pull out all her songs from Spotify, Entertainment Weekly reported.
Nielsen SoundScan released the official records sales of Swift's latest album "1989" Tuesday evening, stating that Swift's album sold 1.287 million units in its first week.
Swift's album sales came close to the record set by singer Britney Spears and rapper Eminem, according to the USA Today.
Spears currently holds the record of most records sales by a female artist after selling 1.319 million copies of her 2000 album "Oops! ...I Did It Again," while "1989" also has the largest sales week for any album since 2002 when Eminem released the "Eminem Show" to a sales week of 1.322 million copies.
"If I had streamed the new album, it's impossible to try to speculate what would have happened," Swift said in an exclusive interview with Yahoo! Music. "But all I can say is that music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment."
"And 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," she concluded.
She also explained her decision to part ways with Spotify.
"I just don't agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free," she said. She explained that she was asked to put out her single "Shake It Off" on Spotify, which she did, but that "it didn't feel right."
Swift said "I felt like I was saying to my fans, 'If you create music someday, if you create a painting someday, someone can just walk into a museum, take it off the wall, rip off a corner off it, and it's theirs now and they don't have to pay for it.' I didn't like the perception that it was putting forth. And so I decided to change the way I was doing things."
Swift had also written about the issue back in July, posting an opinion piece on July 17 on The Wall Street Journal. She wrote that "piracy, file sharing and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid albums drastically."
Swift noted at the time hat she supported paid music since she considers music a valuable form of art and that "art and valuable things should be paid for." She also she hoped artists and labels support her vision and "don't underestimate themselves or undervalue their art."