Taylor Swift is setting records with her latest release 1989 but she also made headlines when she pulled her entire music catalog off of the live streaming service Spotify. Following in the footsteps of Swift, country superstar Jason Aldean, also pulled his latest album down from Spotify. Now the CEO of Spotify, Daniel Ek, is speaking out.
Ek published a blog post that explained his thoughts and the position of the company regarding Swift and Aldean.
Image courtesy of Roger Wong/INFphoto.com
The CEO addressed the controversy head on explaining that, "Taylor Swift is absolutely right: music is art, art has real value, and artists deserve to be paid for it." Ek goes on to explain that Spotify was created to help the artists, not hurt them like piracy.
"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," said Ek.
Ek explained that artists make money every time their songs are streamed, Swift would be making over $6 million from the live streaming service, USA Today reported.