Taylor Swift’s “Shake It It Off” Was Earning $84,000 A Week Before Spotify Removal

News that Taylor Swift's team pulled her entire catalog off Spotify and other streaming music services has been the source of more tweets and traffic than any story since Apple boughts Beats for $3 billion. This led Stuart Dredge of Music Ally to do some unofficial back-of-a-napkin calculations to determined just how much Swift & Company were earning on Spotfy from her hits track "Shake It Off" before the takedown.

While unofficial, Dredge was able to base is conclusions on publicly available play counts and Spotify's official estimates of overall royalty payouts:

"Shake It Off’ rose from the 35th most-streamed track in the week ending 21 September with just over 3.5m plays to third with 10.1m plays in the week ending 28 September; second with 11.3m plays in the week ending 5 October, then first in each of the next three weeks with respectively 11.9m, 11.6m and 11.4m plays, for a total of just under 59.9m Spotify streams.

…the company’s claimed average per-stream rate of $0.006 and $0.0084 – a total payout of between $360,000 and $500,000 to rightsholders (Swift’s label and publisher) for that one track. Or, in those last three weeks before its removal, around $84,000 a week."

Not too shabby a number, or totally inadequate, depending on your point of view. 

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