Spotify Fires Back At Taylor Swift For Yanking Her Music: 'We've Paid Over $2 BILLION In Royalties!'

Ever since file sharing became easy on the internet, the music industry has had to start changing.
One of the biggest adaptations to modern times was the streaming music service. Spotify is one of the largest.
That’s why it was such a big deal when Taylor Swift pulled all her music from one of the world’s favorite sources of good tunes.
She said:

“I’m 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. And I just don’t agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free.”

This obviously made Spotify super upset seeing as how Taylor is like the biggest artist ever.
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek actually totally agrees with Taylor, saying:

“Taylor Swift is absolutely right: music is art, art has real value and artists deserve to be paid for it.”

So then what’s the issue here?? The problem is the middle men. The record companies are multibillion dollar beasts that soak up large chunks of royalty money before it ever reaches the artists!
Spotify claims to have paid out over $2 BILLION in royalties already! Daniel continued:

“The music industry is changing├óΓé¼ΓÇ£and we’re proud of our part in that change├óΓé¼ΓÇ£but lots of problems that have plagued the industry since its inception continue to exist. As I said, we’ve already paid more than $2 billion in royalties to the music industry and if that money is not flowing to the creative community in a timely and transparent way, that’s a big problem. We will do anything we can to work with the industry to increase transparency, improve speed of payments, and give artists the opportunity to promote themselves and connect with fans ├óΓé¼ΓÇ£ that’s our responsibility as a leader in this industry; and it’s the right thing to do.”

Spotify is basically just asking everyone to hang in there as they really grow and find some solid footing.
Their top artists are apparently “are on track to exceed $6 million a year,” and they expect that figure to double within a year!
[ Related: Taylor Swift Removed ALL Her Music From Spotify! ]
So, basically Taylor Swift just denied all her Spotify-using fans access to her music and blew off $6 million in royalties?
She must reallllllly not trust Spotify.
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