Last week, Taylor Swift made headlines in the music biz by pulling her entire back catalogue from uber-popular streaming service Spotify, saying that she was "not willing to contribute [her] life's work to an experiment."

Now, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has responded to the singer's decision with a blog post entitled '$2 Billion and Counting', referencing the amount that the company has paid to labels, publishers and collecting societies for distribution to songwriters and recording artists.

"Taylor Swift is absolutely right: music is art, art has real value, and artists deserve to be paid for it," he wrote. "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."

Ek goes on to dispel several myths about the service - such as free streaming means that artists don't get paid, or that they get paid pittance for their music. He also uses Irish musician Hozier's smash hit 'Take Me to Church' as an example of a song generating revenue for artists.

"In the months since that song was released, it’s been listened to enough times to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars for his label and publisher. At our current size, payouts for a top artist like Taylor Swift (before she pulled her catalog) are on track to exceed $6 million a year, and that’s only growing – we expect that number to double again in a year. Any way you cut it, one thing is clear – we’re paying an enormous amount of money to labels and publishers for distribution to artists and songwriters, and significantly more than any other streaming service."

Swift sold over a million copies of her new album '1989' in the US in its first week alone, but Ek claims that keeping her music on Spotify would not have damaged those sales and that the album is still available to stream on other sites - as well as illegally download. 

"Even though Taylor can pull her music off Spotify (where we license and pay for every song we’ve ever played), her songs are all over services and sites like YouTube and Soundcloud, where people can listen all they want for free. To say nothing of the fans who will just turn back to pirate services like Grooveshark. And sure enough, if you looked at the top spot on The Pirate Bay last week, there was 1989…"