Prince removes his music catalog from streaming services

Apparently, it isn’t decided that Facebook Music will even be a streaming service though.

If you were powering up a bunch of your holiday weekend jams with Prince songs, you might want to check your playlists again – the all-mighty Purple One has removed his music from most streaming services. His legal team has fought tirelessly to keep his sound off YouTube.

The famously eccentric singer abruptly left social media a year ago, but recently returned to Twitter (Xetra: A1W6XZ – news) to promote his Hit And Run tour in which he announces shows with little advance notice.

Despite that, he still is maintaining another online presence through his continued use of Soundcloud.

(Note: Prince’s catalog has not been, and still isn’t, part of Apple’s new streaming service Apple Music.).

A lot of users have blamed Apple Music for the problem.

He quoted one passage that claimed streaming had allowed record labels to “pay themselves twice while reducing what is owed to artists from pennies on the dollar to fractions of pennies on the dollar”. The new development comes just in time for the much-anticipated launch of Apple’s new music streaming service, which debuted yesterday.

Streaming has been a bane for artists since the technology that has come to dominate the way music is consumed leads to far less money in their pockets than CD sales did. “My problem is when the industry covers the music”, he said in an interview with George Lopez. Everybody’s complaining about how music sales are shrinking, but nobody’s changing the way they’re doing things.

The saga has made Swift the standard bearer for artists disgruntled by how streaming services compensate them for playing their music. I think that people should feel that there is a value to what musicians have created, and that’s that. In total, Nielsen measured a 92 percent jump up to 135.2 billion streamed songs.