The 1989 hitmaker pulled her back catalogue from Spotify and her record label Big Machine has leapt to her defence and said the music industry was better before the music streaming site
Taylor Swift’s record label has called out Spotify’s recent claims that the singer was set to make a cool $6 million a year from the music streaming service.
The Shake If Off singer’s record label, Big Machine, has claimed that Taylor actually earned $496,044 (£317,000) over the past year from fans streaming her songs in the United States, the label’s CEO Scott Borchetta said.
Borchetta also reportedly told Time magazine that video streaming site Vevo made his label more money that the Swedish company Spotify.
Meanwhile, Spotify has claimed that Swift actually cashed in closer to $2 million (£1.2 million) from her global earnings.
The company’s head of communications, Jonathan Prince, said: “The more we grow, the more we pay artists, and we’re growing like crazy.”
“Our users, both free and paid, have grown by more than 50 percent in the last year, which means that the run rate for artists of every level of popularity keeps climbing," Prince continued.
"And Taylor just put out a great record, so her popularity has grown too. We paid Taylor’s label and publisher roughly half a million dollars in the month before she took her catalog down—without even having 1989 on our service—and that was only going to go up.”
Taylor, 24, swiped all of her music from Spotify just as her latest album, 1989, was about to drop, and while the music streaming service begged her to reconsider in a fairly hilarious stunt, she insisted that she wasn’t fairly ‘compensated’.
"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,” she told Yahoo Music.
"I just don't agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free."
Spotify’s chief executive, Daniel Ek, has now defended the company’s business model and said that Spotify had paid $2 billion (£1.2 billion) to the music industry so far.
In a blog post, Ek wrote: "Taylor Swift is absolutely right: music is art, art has real value, and artists deserve to be paid for it.”
He also added: "At our current size, payouts for a top artist like Taylor Swift (before she pulled her catalogue) are on track to exceed $6m a year, and that's only growing - we expect that number to double again in a year."
But Big Machine’s Borchetta believes that the industry was better for before Spotify’s arrival and that Taylor’s move to delete her back history from the service was for a bigger point.
"The facts show that the music industry was much better off before Spotify hit these shores," he told Time.
"Don't forget this is for the most successful artist in music today. What about the rest of the artists out there struggling to make a career? Over the last year, what Spotify has paid is the equivalent of less than 50,000 albums sold."
