Adele's Manager Discusses Streaming, Spotify, & Taylor Swift

Adele‘s manager Jonathan Dickins is speaking out to discuss the situation with streaming, which he calls “the future, whether people like it or not.”

“I don’t believe one size necessarily fits all with streaming,” he added (via Billboard). “To get around the situation with someone like Taylor Swift — and Spotify won’t do it — is that maybe there is a window between making something available on the premium service earlier than its made available on the free service.”

“What’s interesting is that people take things down off Spotify, yet if I search now for Taylor Swift on YouTube, within the space of 30 seconds I can have the whole Taylor Swift [album] streamed. Some of it is ad-supported, so there is revenue, and some of it’s not,” Jonathan continued.

Adele famously wouldn’t let her album 21 be streamed on Spotify until long after it was released.

“On the one hand, the labels are trumping YouTube as a marketing tool and 10 million views is [hailed] as a marketing stroke of genius,” he continued. “On the other hand, they’re looking at 10 million streams on Spotify and going: ‘That’s X amount of lost sales.’ So I think there is a lopsided effect. For an artist that needs discovering, anyone who has got a real good album, but is very niche, I think streaming is great for them. Taylor Swift probably looks at it and thinks, ‘There is an element of cannibalisation. I am a brand. People know who I am and I want to protect the record sales.’ And that’s fair enough.”

WHAT DO YOU THINK about Adele’s manager’s view on the streaming situation?