Taylor Swift said Spotify “reacted to criticism like a corporate machine”

It could be said Taylor Swift’s back catalogue won’t be reinstated on Spotify in the near future. During an interview Vanity Fair, Swift praised Apple Music for its response to her criticism and said “the start-up with no cash flow reacted to criticism like a corporate machine.”

While Swift doesn’t actually name Spotify in the interview extract published byVanity Fair overnight, given her stance against the service’s free tier hasn’t changed, the reference is clear.

Swift discussed Apple Music’s major back-down on its refusal to pay independent labels, songwriters, publishers and artists during the free, three-month trial.

“Apple treated me like I was a voice of a creative community that they actually cared about,” she said.

Apple’s U-turn response followed Swift’s blog post published to herTumblr, which she told Vanity Fair she stayed up until 4am composing. “Sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and I’ll write a song and I can’t sleep until I finish it, and it was like that with the letter,” she told the publication. “My fears were that I would be looked at as someone who just whines and rants about this thing that no one else is really ranting about.”

Swift compared Apple’s almost immediate positive response to Spotify’s, where the service wouldn’t allow her music to feature her musicexclusively on its paid tier. “[…] I found it really ironic that the multi-billion-dollar company reacted to criticism with humility, and the start-up with no cash flow reacted to criticism like a corporate machine.”

Swift’s absence on Spotify doesn’t seem to have affected the Swedish streaming giant’s growth however. Available in 58 markets, it now boasts over 20 million paying subscribers, more than 75 million active users and over 30 million songs. It has also paid more than US$3 billion to rights holders since its launch in 2006 and more than US$300 million in the first three months of 2015 alone.