Spotify founder Daniel Ek has directly responded to Taylor Swift’s decision to remove her entire catalogue from the service - whilst casually announcing that Spotify now has more than 50 million registered users, including 12.5 million paying subscribers.

That means the service has added 10 million registered users and 2.5 million paying subscribers in the six months since it last announced its consumer figures.

Ek’s new blog post also reveals that Spotify has paid out more than $2 billion to ...