For years now musicians have fought to protect their intellectual property against those who would steal it and distribute it for free among the public. For the most part, people have been somewhat understanding of an artist’s right to profit off of their own creations. But as popular musicians become wealthier, they also tend to become stingier with their music, going to great lengths to ensure that every single dime is accounted for. Enter Taylor Swift, one of 2014’s most profitable artists, earning over $60 million last year. Thought of as a lucrative act for the past several years, Swift has seen her profits more than quadruple in the past six months and now is falling into the same pit of egotism and greed as so many other artists have before her.

Recently Swift decided to pull all of her music off of the cloud streaming music site, Spotify. Swift’s reasons were stated as the site did not pay well enough for her music, and she was quoted saying that “Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. It’s my opinion that music should not be free.”

In order to further examine this statement, we must first detail just how exactly Spotify operates. To explain the service is simple, and most of you are more likely than not already familiar with how it works. People can either use the service for free or pay a monthly subscription. Spotify pays the artists that a user listens to either through ad revenue or through the profit made off of monthly subscriptions.

For whatever reason, Swift has decided that Pandora, the alternative music streaming service to Spotify, pays enough for her music as no actions have been taken to stop users from streaming her music on that site.

So how much do artists exactly earn by providing their music on Spotify for users to access? According to Time magazine, an artist typically makes anywhere between 0.006 and 0.0084 cents per play of any particular song. Now only focusing on the above fact might make you think that Taylor Swift has a point saying that she does not want to provide her original, “valuable art” for such a pittance. But before you start siding with Swift in this argument, take into account the amount of money that she made last month allowing her music to be streamed on Spotify. Out of the total 40 million current users of the service, nearly 16 million of them listened to at least one of Swift’s songs in the past 30 days. Considering the lowest amount of money she could potentially make here, 0.006 cents times 16 million plays is about $96,000. Figuring this as an average monthly revenue for a twelve month period means that, minimum, Taylor Swift could make up to $1.15 million dollars a year on Spotify income alone.

Taylor Swift’s music is valuable and should be paid for, but splitting hairs about hundredths of a cent on royalties that could already be potentially making her over a million dollars a year is just ludicrous.