Spotify’s CEO responds to Taylor Swift’s harsh criticism

Last week it was revealed that Taylor Swift decided to remove all of her music from Spotify due to the fact that she felt the service doesn’t “fairly compensate the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music” and that she couldn’t “agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free.” Well now Daniel Ek, the CEO of Spotify, has a few words of his own for Swift, according to The New York Times.

“Taylor Swift is absolutely right: music is art, art has real value, and artists deserve to be paid for it,” wrote Ek, as quoted by MTV.” “We started Spotify because we love music and piracy was killing it. So all the talk swirling around lately about how Spotify is making money on the backs of artists upsets me big time. Our whole reason for existence is to help fans find music and help artists connect with fans through a platform that protects them from piracy and pays them for their amazing work.”

“Spotify is not the enemy; piracy is the enemy,” Ek continued, as quoted by BGR. “You know why? Two numbers: Zero and Two Billion. Piracy doesn’t pay artists a penny – nothing, zilch, zero. Spotify has paid more than two billion dollars to labels, publishers and collecting societies for distribution to songwriters and recording artists.”

“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,” Ek admitted. “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 – that’s our responsibility as a leader in this industry; and it’s the right thing to do.”