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Spotify Founder Hits Back At Taylor Swift
In a week that saw Taylor Swift pull her entire catalogue from music streaming service Spotify, the founder of the company, Swedish entrepreneur Daniel Ek, has now released an open letter entitled “$2 Billion and Counting” addressing Swift’s concerns about the service.
You can read the full article here.
In the article, Ek comments “Taylor Swift is absolutely right: music is art, art has real value, and artists deserve to be paid for it. We started Spotify because we love music and piracy was killing it. So all the talk swirling around lately about how Spotify is making money on the backs of artists upsets me big time.”
Ek’s article highlights that Spotify has paid more than two billion dollars to date to labels, publishers and collecting societies for distribution to songwriters and recording artists.
The streaming service now has more than 50 million active users, of whom 12.5 million are subscribers each paying $120 per year. Ek also goes on to describe how the service, at it’s current size, pays out in excess of $6 million a year to it’s top performing artists, of which Swift was previously one of the front runners.
“Here’s the thing I really want artists to understand” conludes Ek in the article “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, and we pay nearly 70% of all our revenue back to you.”
Watch Taylor Swift’s latest video for ‘Blank Space’ here:
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