Taylor Swift doesn’t like Spotify, says her work has ‘greater value’

Taylor Swift isn’t letting up in her increasingly public stance regarding the placement of her music on the Spotify streaming service, and has expanded her thoughts in a newly published interview. The singer, who withheld her new album “1989” from Spotify during a battle over how music is offered on that and other streaming sites, elucidated her position in a Time magazine Q&A.

Her thoughts were published as her manager, Scott Borchetta, responded to claims from Spotify Chief Executive Daniel Ek about the artist royalties paid by the popular music streaming service.

Asked why she pulled her music from Spotify, Swift told Time that she had tried the service “and I didn’t like the way it felt,” adding that she believes her work has greater value than how it’s offered in the Spotify model.

“Everybody’s complaining about how music sales are shrinking, but nobody’s changing the way they’re doing things,” she said. “They keep running towards streaming, which is, for the most part, what has been shrinking the numbers of paid album sales.”

In a separate story, Borchetta further explained his artist’s position. “The facts show that the music industry was much better off before Spotify hit these shores,” Borchetta told Time’s Jack Dickey. “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.”

Borchetta also disputed Spotify CEO Ek’s claim that Swift stood to make $6 million from the company in the next year, saying she made only about $500,000 in the last 12 months.

In a blog post published on Spotify’s site last week, Ek offered an overview of his company’s philosophy, which is that Spotify is helping to combat illegal file sharing. “Piracy doesn’t pay artists a penny – nothing, zilch, zero. Spotify has paid more than $2 billion to labels, publishers and collecting societies for distribution to songwriters and recording artists,” he wrote, confirming a commitment to work “day and night to recover money for artists and the music business that piracy was stealing away.”

According to Nielsen SoundScan, Swift’s “1989” sold nearly 1.3 million copies in its first week on the market and an additional 400,000 copies in its second week.

Follow Randall Roberts on Twitter: @liledit