In defence of Spotify's position in the erupting artist royalties row CEO Daniel Ek claimed that Taylor Swift, the most vocal opponent of the music streaming service, could stand to make $6 million (£3.81 million) next year if she decided to leave her tracks on the platform.

However, Scott Borchetta, CEO of Swift's record label Big Machine disagrees with that figure, claiming that his artist only made $496,044 in the last year from domestic streaming of her songs. Indeed, he even claims that Swift made more from video site Vevo than she did from Spotify.

International streaming on Spotify did glean more than Borchetta revealed for her domestic return though, three times as much in fact, resulting in a final sum of around $2 million. That's still $4 million short than Ek claimed she could make in 2015 but considerably more than Borchetta was willing to admit at the time.

The Spotify CEO was basing his forecast on the rate of growth in users the streaming service is currently experiencing, a position confirmed by the company's global head of communications, Jonathan Prince. "The more we grow, the more we pay artists, and we’re growing like crazy," he said in a statement sent to Pocket-lint.

"Our users, both free and paid, have grown by more than 50 per cent in the last year, which means that the run rate for artists of every level of popularity keeps climbing. And Taylor just put out a great record, so her popularity has grown too.

"We paid Taylor’s label and publisher roughly half a million dollars in the month before she took her catalogue down - without even having 1989 on our service - and that was only going to go up.”

It's something that will seemingly fall on deaf ears when it comes to Borchetta though. "The facts show that the music industry was much better off before Spotify hit these shores," Borchetta told Time.

"Don’t forget this is for the most successful artist in music today. What about the rest of the artists out there struggling to make a career? Over the last year, what Spotify has paid is the equivalent of less than 50,000 albums sold."

Spotify claims that it has paid $2 billion to labels and publishers since its founding in 2008.

This one will run and run, we feel.