Taylor Swift recently made headlines when she removed her entire song catalog from Spotify, prompting the streaming service to create playlists begging her to come back.
Spotify may not want to hold its breath though.
"Music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment," Swift told Yahoo!. "And I'm not willing to contribute my life's work to an experiment that I don't feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music."
The singer said she tried to stay "open-minded" and put her lead single off new album 1989, "Shake It Off," on Spotify to "see how it feels."
"It didn't feel right to me. I felt like I was saying to my fans, 'If you create music someday, if you create a painting someday, someone can just walk into a museum, take it off the wall, rip off a corner off it, and it's theirs now and they don't have to pay for it.' I didn't like the perception that it was putting forth. And so I decided to change the way I was doing things."
Of Spotify's 40 million active users, approximately 10 million are paying subscribers. The rest use the free ad-sponsored level of the service.
A Spotify spokesman told Mashable that 70 percent of the company's revenue is paid out to the rights holders of each song, who then pay artists based on individual deals. Rights holders on average make between $0.006 and $0.0084 per stream.
