Spotify is embroiled in a highly public war of words with pop star Taylor Swift, who recently pulled her music catalog from the site, calling Spotify a “grand experiment” that devalues music. And that’s just fine with Founder and CEO Daniel Ek. In a recent interview with Billboard, the charismatic young leader of one of the world’s biggest streaming services claims the rift with Swift put Spotify in the spotlight, helping to differentiate the service from the other big player in the streaming game, Pandora.
CEO Daniel Ek sees a bright side to Spotify’s ugly breakup with Taylor Swift. “The public probably learned there’s something called Spotify, and that it’s not Pandora,” Ek said in a Q&A with Billboard. Around the time of her fifth album release this fall, Swift pulled her entire set of tunes from Spotify. That album, “1989,” went platinum but never appeared on the streaming site. What followed was a public spat between Ek and Scott Borchetta, CEO of Swift’s recording label Big Machine, with wildly conflicting statements about how much she was paid for streams of her music within the U.S. over the last year. Ek said, in a blog post, that Swift was on track to make more than $6 million this year, while Borchetta said it was less than $500,000. In the Billboard interview, Ek said, “There are many artists to whom, through the labels, we’re paying out millions a year already. Those check sizes will just keep increasing. I’m certain that if we can get the billion-people-plus that are consuming music online and move them into a model like Spotify, the industry would be considerably bigger than it is today.”