Spotify CEO takes a $2B shot at Taylor Swift

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Spotify's CEO had strong words for Taylor Swift after she pulled her catalog from the streaming music service.

Alex Dalenberg

Upstart Business Journal contributor

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W hat is Taylor Swift missing out on by dumping Spotify? The music streaming service says payouts this year are on pace to exceed at least $6 million for “top artists" like Swift.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek hit back against Swift's charges that Spotify doesn't fairly compensate writers, producers, artists, and other music creators in a lengthy blog post.

To make his case, Ek unveiled Spotify's most recent user numbers: 50 million active users and 12.5 million paying subscribers. He also said the company has paid out some $2 billion to musicians since it was founded in 2008.

Here's the upshot, via Ek:

Two numbers: Zero and Two Billion. 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. A billion dollars from the time we started Spotify in 2008 to last year and another billion dollars since then. And that's two billion dollars' worth of listening that would have happened with zero or little compensation to artists and songwriters through piracy or practically equivalent services if there was no Spotify – we're working day and night to recover money for artists and the music business that piracy was stealing away.

It's also pretty clear that Ek feels like Spotify is being singled out by Swift, who pulled her entire catalog from his service but is still working with the likes of YouTube and Soundcloud.

She sold more than 1.2 million copies of 1989 in the US in its first week, and that's awesome. We hope she sells a lot more because she's an exceptional artist producing great music. In the old days, multiple artists sold multiple millions every year. That just doesn't happen any more; people's listening habits have changed – and they're not going to change back. You can't look at Spotify in isolation – even though Taylor can pull her music off Spotify (where we license and pay for every song we've ever played), her songs are all over services and sites like YouTube and Soundcloud, where people can listen all they want for free. To say nothing of the fans who will just turn back to pirate services like Grooveshark. And sure enough, if you looked at the top spot on The Pirate Bay last week, there was 1989…

Here's the thing I really want artists to understand: Our interests are totally aligned with yours. Even if you don't believe that's our goal, look at our business. Our whole business is to maximize the value of your music. We don't use music to drive sales of hardware or software. We use music to get people to pay for music. The more we grow, the more we'll pay you. We're going to be transparent about it all the way through. And we have a big team of your fellow artists here because if you think we haven't done well enough, we want to know, and we want to do better. None of that is ever going to change.

You can read the entire post here.

Alex is a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist. He writes about media entrepreneurs and creatives for Upstart Business Journal.