Taylor Swift might be Spotify enemy number one, but it seems she’s not against cosying up to its rivals.
The US pop star’s music is now streaming on hi-res streaming platform Tidal, a service recently bought out by fellow star Jay Z.
Swift hit the headlines late last year after the artist pulled all of her audio content from music streaming market leader Spotify.
She claimed that Spotify wasn’t sufficiently compensating artists for their music, and it was wrong that the service gave music away for free.
Spotify does in fact offer a free music tier, although this service creates revenue through advertising and limits users to shuffled audio.
A premium subscription is also available, which removes the advertising, as well as bringing a number of other tempting features like offline audio and non-shuffle playback.
Tidal, meanwhile, has no such free offering, and instead demands users pay for its high quality audio services at a charge of £19.99.
The service is available in dozens of countries – albeit not as many as spotify – and has some 17,000 users.
Related: Why musicians hate Spotify
While it might seem odd that Taylor Swift would be so vehemently opposed to one streaming service yet sign a deal with another, it’s clear that the artist is specifically against free-tier music platforms.
At the time of the original controversy, however, Spotify did fire back at Swift, revealing that it had paid out upwards of $2 billion in royalties to music artists.
“That’s two billion dollars’ worth of listening that would have happened with zero or little compensation to artists and songwriters through piracy or practically equivalent services if there was no Spotify,” explained Daniel Ek, Spotify’s CEO.
“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.”
