Taylor Swift Was on Track to Make $6M This Year on Spotify, Says CEO Daniel Ek
Taylor Swift Was on Track to Make $6M This Year on Spotify, Says CEO Daniel Ek – Taylor Swift may have thought she’d ended the conversation about her music and its place on streaming services after dismissively calling them a “ grand experiment ” and pulling tracks from Spotify and other services.
Daniel Ek, the service’s CEO, posted a long response to the controversy today, along with a defense of his service, in which he revealed 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 also noted that Swift herself was on track to pull in $6 million this year for her own catalog this year “before she pulled her catalog.”
Of course, her new album, 1989, made around $12 million in its first week. Nielsen SoundScan says it broke the record for the biggest debut week of the year, selling 1.287 million copies in that period.
