Opinion

JENNIFER CALFAS

EDITOR IN CHIEF

AARICA MARSH 

and DEREK WOLFE 

EDITORIAL PAGE EDITORS

LEV FACHER

MANAGING EDITOR

420 Maynard St. 

Ann Arbor, MI 48109

 tothedaily@michigandaily.com

Edited and managed by students at 

the University of Michigan since 1890.

Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily’s editorial board. 

All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4A — Wednesday, January 28, 2015

H

ey bae, we need to talk about 
how you pulled your music from 
 

Spotify.

I remember it happen-

ing. I was on a bench at my 
college’s gym, and I heard 
the ending melody of T.I.’s 
“No Mediocre.” I’ve spent 
enough time immersed 
in my workout playlist to 
know “Shake It Off” comes 
next. Or, well, that’s what 
should’ve happened.

As you well know, I 

wasn’t met with a force-
ful “I stay out too late,” 
because you decided to pull the entirety of your 
music collection from Spotify.

Intrigued after my workout, I set off on 

an Internet search to get to the bottom of 
why you did this. I came across my answer 
 

pretty quickly.

In your recent Wall Street Journal article, 

you said, “Music is art, and art is important 
and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. 
Valuable things should be paid for. It’s my 
opinion that music should not be free.”

This clearly references the idea that Spotify 

is a free service for non-Premium members, 
and since these members can listen to your 
music for free, they’re not providing financial 
worth to your art.

I see your point, and as a concept, it 

makes sense to me. Music is art, and you 
want your art to be held to a standard that 
 

reflects compensation.

But pulling your Spotify catalog isn’t help-

ing you.

You’re turning a blind eye to the reality that 

not all of your fans can afford a $12 album. To 
a celebrity in your financial standing, it may be 
difficult to envision, but trust me — it’s a reality 
that many of us face. When you’re poor, $12 can 
genuinely be the difference between whether 
you have enough grocery money for the week.

It also doesn’t help that your audience is 

most susceptible to being broke. I don’t think 
you need statistics to know a huge chunk of 
your fans are teenagers, college students and 
20-something recent college graduates. If 
teenage and college students come from low-
income families, they may not have the money 
to spend on an album. Recent college gradu-
ates are also making the lowest salaries in 
their lives and are likely paying back expensive 
 

student loans.

Plus, consider if every artist follows your 

precedent. If listening to an artist’s album 
required a $12 prerequisite, how reasonable 
would it be for anyone of low socioeconomic 
status to keep up with artists?

Yes, your music is art and deserves rea-

sonable compensation, but the reasonable 
compensation should be scaled to a person’s 
background. Music isn’t like fine art hung in 
the living rooms of affluent homeowners; it’s 
an inherent cultural underpinning to our soci-
ety. Almost everyone listens to music. We’re 
bombarded by it on our computers, radios, 
offices, headphones, parties and daily con-
versations. In the same way that you deserve 
universal compensation for music, society 

An open letter to Taylor Swift

A

s we watch the snow from 
inside our homes curled 
up next to the fireplace 

or hurry to get 
from 
one 
class 

to the next, it’s 
easy to forget the 
people 
suffer-

ing from home-
lessness right in 
our 
own 
back-

yards. According 
to the National 
Coalition 
for 

the 
Homeless, 

people 
can 
die 

from 
hypother-

mia when the temperature is as 
low as 50 degrees Fahrenheit. 
Michigan winters get much lower 
than this, and last winter had the 
lowest 
recorded 
temperatures 
 

since 1977-78.

A year ago, as people scrambled 

to find somewhere warm to stay 
because of the harsh winter con-
ditions, the shelters in Ann Arbor 
struggled to accommodate them.

I 
had 
the 
opportunity 
to 

interview Ellen Schulmeister, the 
executive director of the Shelter 
Association of Washtenaw County, 
who described how severe the 
 

shelter conditions were.

According to Schulmeister, “Last 

winter was really bad and we had a 
40 percent increase in the number 
of people that we saw coming into 
our winter programs.”

“That was a huge increase for us 

to absorb and we really didn’t have 
the space in here. For the first time 
in the 11 years that we have been 
here we were putting people on all 
of our floors,” she said.

The Ann Arbor City Council has 

taken steps to fix some of these 

problems, like investing money into 
the Delonis Center, a Washtenaw 
County homeless center, as well as 
supporting other daytime warming 
shelters. Schulmeister commented 
on how the Delonis center helps.

“It’s going to help us provide more 

comfortable space for the people that 
come in so we’ll have an overflow for 
night time at a different location,” 
Schulmeister explained. “We will 
also have extra day places where 
people can actually be during the 
daytime.” She also said that although 
they usually focus their energy on 
finding affordable housing, during 
the winter the focus is to find “life-
saving shelter.”

The Ann Arbor City Council also 

recently approved a resolution stat-
ing that police would only remove 
people from camping on public or 
private property if they received 
complaints. The resolution claims “it 
is not the practice of the City of Ann 
Arbor to proactively seek out home-
less camps for removal, nor to broad-
ly deploy strategies to render areas 
used as campsites unusable.” Some 
councilmembers, including Coun-
cilmember Jack Eaton (D–Ward 4), 
believe that this resolution ignores 
some of the greater issues facing the 
homeless, like the need for afford-
able housing and other service.

It’s possible that the reason they 

do not want to actively seek peo-
ple living in these encampments is 
because they fear there are too many 
homeless people to absorb in the cur-
rent homeless shelters. This may lead 
to greater problems, but it also means 
that the Ann Arbor City Council 
needs to focus on addressing these 
issues as well as trying to get people 
out of homelessness and thinking of 
better long-term solutions.

People who suffer from home-

lessness face a stigma that creates 
another obstacle. Often people see 
a homeless person asking for money 
and assume they’re just going to 
use it on alcohol or that the reason 
they are homeless is because they 
are lazy. This makes them hesitant 
to help, without realizing that the 
consequence of this stigma is that it 
could lead to death, especially dur-
ing these harsh winter conditions.

In 
regards 
to 
why 
helping 

the 
homeless 
is 
important, 

Schulmeister said, “I understand 
when people don’t want to spend a 
lot of money, but there comes a time 
where someone’s actual life is at 
risk, and this is one of those times 
and that’s the best reason to help at 
least during this time.”

Helping may not necessarily 

mean one concrete solution. There 
are ways to help by providing 
monetary donations to the shelters 
themselves, but if people prefer 
that the money goes directly to the 
homeless, the Shelter Association 
of Washtenaw County also takes 
gift cards that go directly to buying 
new items for the homeless. They 
are always in need of volunteers, 
especially in the winter. They do 
not have the facilities to take used 
clothing because they need to keep 
bedbugs out of the shelters, as they 
can create major problems.

In the long term, getting people 

off the streets and into affordable 
housing is ideal, but this transition 
out of homelessness is very diffi-
cult, especially for those with fami-
lies. They at least deserve a chance 
at survival.

— Rabab Jafri can be reached 

at rfjafri@umich.edu.

RABAB 
JAFRI

A chance for survival

F

or some, sports, television shows, 
comic fandoms or celebrity tweets con-
jure moments of irrational enjoyment 

when individuals spontane-
ously shed layers of formal-
ity and reveal small hidden 
passions. In my case, I have 
a penchant for words in 
their most rhythmic forms. 
I’m a bit of a music addict 
and a poetry nerd. Wheth-
er it’s song lyrics or stan-
zas of poetry, deciphering 
the multitude of possible 
meanings 
sparks 
excite-

ment within me. When my 
friend 
unenthusiastically 

informed me the curriculum for his creative 
writing class included a unit of reading and 
writing poetry, I gleefully interrogated him. 
His phone swiftly became the recipient of an 
onslaught of text messages inquiring whose 
work he’d be reading, what types of poetry 
and if we could exchange the titles of inter-
esting poems we encountered, since I’m cur-
rently taking a poetry course myself.

Now may be an opportune moment to 

casually remind you of that nerd status I 
 

previously mentioned.

Last week as I sat in the League doing 

homework, my friend surprisingly complied 
with my overeager request. He texted me a 
poem by Anne Sexton titled “In Celebration 
of My Uterus.” The title was odd, yet intrigu-
ing. My first instinct — after an initial glance 
— was to reply with a sarcastic remark, con-
sidering I could think of a monthly occur-
rence that would dissuade me from such a 
celebration. However, my sarcasm dissipated 
as I delved into the language of the poem. Ini-
tially, the speaker discusses the possibility 
of removing a physiological marker of what 
makes her a woman — her uterus. Though 
a signifier of her sex was deemed tainted or 
useless, the speaker acknowledges that her 
value as both an individual and as a woman 
is not lessened in any way. The poem, instead, 
expands and transforms into a description of 
womanhood and the multitude of its magnifi-
cent variations.

While there are probably numerous inter-

pretations of the work and a myriad of aspects 
I haven’t mulled over yet, two lines, in par-
ticular, struck me. Sexton, in the first stanza, 
writes “They said you were immeasurably 
empty/but you are not.”

Women, in our society, are continu-

ally impressed with the notion that we are 
“immeasurably empty” in some way. Woman-
hood far too often translates into weakness 
— whether it’s emotionally, intellectually, 
physically or professionally. Even in the 
realm of academia, femininity is incorrectly 
construed as an indicator of deficiency. The 
multitude of degree holders, from bachelor’s 
to doctoral degrees, is comprised of women, 
but a study found academic fields that “most 
valued sheer intellectual brilliance such as 
philosophy, physics and math were the most 
likely to have fewer women in their ranks.”

In these male-dominated fields, innate 

genius is unreasonably portrayed as part of 
the job description. According to Sarah-Jane 
Leslie, professor of philosophy at Princeton 
University, one of the leaders of the study, 
“The problem lies not with women’s aptitude 
but with the ‘brilliance required’ attitude.”

In further coverage, Leslie elaborated 

on how the establishment of this unrealis-
tic expectation merges with long-instilled 
gender-stereotypes and deters women from 
participating in certain academic disciplines.

The automatic societal assumption is that 

women lack the knowledge or technical skills 
to participate in male-dominated profes-
sions and areas of study. Society imbues us 
with the assumption that women are devoid 
of rationality and logic, and possessing femi-
nine characteristics can hinder professional 
progress. The only way to counteract the 
negative effects of appearing too feminine 
in the workplace — according to a 2011 study 
conducted by the Stanford Graduate School 
of Business — is for women to “self-monitor” 
their behavior and “simultaneously present” 
both masculine and feminine traits. Women 
who are able to maneuver themselves across a 
tightrope strung between stereotypical con-
structs of masculinity and femininity obtain 
more promotions, according to the results of 
the study.

However, new research coincides more 

with the ideas I encountered in Sexton’s 
poem. While supposed signifiers of woman-
hood are misconstrued as undesirable or 
problematic, the shifting atmospheres of the 
contemporary workplace and classroom may 
soon reveal more of the exemplary merits of 
women. More and more, we’re living in a col-
laborative society where the ability to work 
in groups is crucial to accomplishing profes-
sional goals in every field of study.

In a recent study conducted by research-

ers from MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Union 
College, the “average social sensitivity of 
group members” was deemed as a crucial 
component in creating the smartest groups. 
Individuals with higher levels of social sen-
sitivity are more capable of deciphering the 
tone and facial cues of their colleagues, and 
women tend to display higher levels of “social 
sensitivity.” As a result, the findings suggest 
groups composed of a larger proportion of 
women performed better than groups of men 
in the study.

Just as Sexton’s poem concludes with a 

listing of women participating in various 
activities, ranging from studying the cardio-
vascular tissue to straddling a cello in Russia 
to examining the angular distance of meteors, 
intelligence is as diverse as the pursuits that 
require it and the people who pursue it. Bril-
liance is not restricted to one gender or one 
group. Levels of intelligence are expressed 
by a variation of degrees; no one type is 
superior. Rather than using intelligence 
to create boundaries for ourselves, society 
should revel in the intellectual diversity of 
 

each individual.

—Melissa Scholke can be reached 

at melikaye@umich.edu.

Celebrating intelligence

Claire Bryan, Regan Detwiler, Devin Eggert, David 
Harris, Jordyn Kay, Aarica Marsh, Victoria Noble, 

Michael Paul, Allison Raeck, Melissa Scholke, 
Michael Schramm, Matthew Seligman, Linh Vu, 

Mary Kate Winn, Jenny Wang, Derek Wolfe

EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

MELISSA 
SCHOLKE

MICHAEL 
SCHRAMM

E-mail RachEl at Rdawson@umich.Edu
RACHEL DAWSON

deserves universal access to it.

Lack of access is downright 

crippling. In the case of mega stars 
like you who are frequently a topic 
of conversation, lack of access 
restricts our knowledge of basic 
information. It also creates a barrier 
for the general enjoyment of the arts, 
something I’m sure you don’t want.

So let’s figure out a way that we 

both can get what we want. I’ve 
prepared three options that I believe 
can make us both happy.

First, I’d like you to consider the 

idea of putting your catalogue back 
on Spotify. Seventy percent of their 
profits go to music labels, so they do 
care about artists making money. 
With Spotify increasing as a brand, 
it will generate more revenue and 
therefore compensate artists like 
you more. It may never become as 
significant as album sales, but it has 
the potential to become more signifi-
cant. I promise.

Now, you may think this leaves 

a hole in your demand: non-
Premium users aren’t financially 
compensating you for your art. 
While they wouldn’t be paying you 
money, they would pay costs to listen 
to your music. In my economics 
classes, we often talk about costs 
lying outside the financial. If a user 
isn’t paying for Premium, they must 
listen to commercials while online. 
Those interested in listening to your 
art must pay a cost of listening to ads 
— paying with their literal time — to 
hear your music. Maybe it’s not the 

form of compensation you’re looking 
for, but I think it’s a valuable one if 
you meditate on it.

Second, you could work a deal with 

Spotify so only Premium subscribers 
could hear your music. Those that 
have a premium subscription have 
to pay $10 a month, so if only those 
members could listen to your music, 
they would indirectly pay for your 
music. Though this could be a diffi-
cult cost for lower-SES subscribers, 
it’s a stronger alternative than the 
idea of each person having to pay 
more than that for every album.

Third, if you really insist that 

people make a direct and intentional 
payment for your art, you could use a 
“pay what you can” method. Instead 
of a flat cost, your online site could 
have a sales section where the user 
inputs the price they pay. You could 
include a suggested dollar donation 
as the store price, and you could also 
require a $1 minimum. This way, you 
get paid for your art and people can 
afford to purchase it.

Plus, I don’t think this would lead 

to everyone paying $1 for albums. 
Businesses like Panera Bread have 
incorporated 
pay-what-you-can 

methods and make approximately 75 
percent of the list price. The time it 
would take to ship CDs would also 
cause people who can afford your 
album to buy it in stores. It would 
just provide your fans, that are 
struggling, with an alternative to 
still hear your music, and those that 
really love it would pay you more.

And luckily, you don’t have to 

worry about missing that 25 percent 
profit 
because 
you’re 
a 
multi-

millionaire. You never have to worry 
about being so poor at 15 that asking 
for a green pepper starts a fight 
with your family because someone 
doesn’t think it’s affordable.

People paying less than the album 

price for your art may not be the 
most ideal situation, but think about 
the alternatives. Though your album 
sold so well, at 3.66 million copies in 
2014, we both know that significant-
ly more people in our country of 320 
million people own your album. Ille-
gal streaming and sharing CDs are 
simplistic and reliable methods that 
people can use to get music. Since 
people will utilize these options 
when they can’t afford your music, 
providing 
cheaper 
opportunities 

could serve as a compromise that 
gets everyone what they want.

Taylor, I’ve been a fan of yours 

since I was 12 years old. I lay on my 
blue and yellow comforter listening 
to “Teardrops On My Guitar.” At 15, 
“You Belong With Me” became my 
anthem as I developed a crush on 
someone who didn’t reciprocate the 
feeling. “22” became the jam that 
helped glue the highlights of a col-
lege road trip in my heart.

So please, don’t leave a blank 

space in my memories where 1989 
should go.

—Michael Schramm can be 

reached at mschramm@umich.edu.

