The end of Taylor Swift’s relationship with Spotify has just turned ugly. Daniel Ek, the CEO of the popular streaming service aired his frustration with the singer, insisting that artists get paid when their music is streamed on Spotify.
In a lengthy blog post, Ek made it clear that he only agrees with Swift on one thing - “music is art, art has real value, and artists deserve to be paid for it.” However, they don’t see eye-to-eye on anything else when it comes to streaming.
Ek wrote that his team created Spotify to combat piracy, which really doesn’t pay an artist anything.
“Piracy doesn’t pay artists a penny – nothing, zilch, zero. Spotify has paid more than two billion dollars to labels, publishers and collecting societies for distribution to songwriters and recording artists,” Ek wrote. “A billion dollars from the time we started Spotify in 2008 to last year and another billion dollars since then.”
He further explained that, even if a user doesn’t pay for the premium account, an artist is still paid thanks to the ads.
Ek also tried to end the myth that Spotify pays artists too little to live on and said that his company does not hurt sales. Indeed, he noted that several artists who debuted their music on Spotify saw better sales.
Last week, Swift pulled all her music from Spotify, telling Yahoo Music that she’s “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.”
Big Machine Records CEO Scott Borchetta explained to Nikki Sixx other reasons for pulling Swift’s music from Spotify, notes Billboard.
“We never wanted to embarrass a fan,” Borchetta said on Nov. 7. “If this fan went and purchased the record, CD, iTunes, wherever, and then their friends go, 'Why did you pay for it? It's free on Spotify.' We're being completely disrespectful to that superfan who wants to invest.”
Borchetta also said that Swift’s music could still be found on services that only offer paid subscriptions, like Rdio, Rhapsody and Beats Music.
Among this controversy, Swift’s 1989 has sold over 1.2 million copies and is expected to have a second week at No. 1 on the Billboard chart.
image courtesy of Roger Wong/INFphoto.com
There has been a critical error on your website.<\/p>
Learn more about debugging in WordPress.<\/a><\/p>","data":{"status":500},"additional_errors":[]}