Taylor Swift Would Have Earned $6 Million from Spotify This Year

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has spoken out saying that Taylor Swift Swift was on track to pull in $6 million this year for her own discography “before she pulled her catalog.”

Of course, her new album 1989 is currently pulling in around $12 million per week. Nielsen SoundScan says it broke the record for the biggest debut week of the year, selling 1.287 million copies.

In a response to Taylor's comments calling the service "a grand experiment," Elk reveals that the company has paid out over $2 billion to labels, publishers and collecting societies (who in turn distribute to songwriters and recording artists), and that Spotify now has 50 million active users, including 12.5 million subscribers each paying $120 per year.

Ek notes that the $2 billion it has paid out breaks down to “a billion dollars from the time we started Spotify in 2008 to last year and another billion dollars since then.”

In other words, the payments are accelerating as the service grows. He says that 80% of the service’s paying users started out as free users. “If you take away only one thing, it should be this: No free, no paid, no two billion dollars,” he writes.

You can read Elk's blog in full here.