Los Angeles - Taylor Swift might never, ever get back together with Spotify, she says, because she does not like the idea of giving out her songs for free.

In an interview with Yahoo! Music that was posted on Thursday, the singer explained her decision to pull her catalogue from the most popular music streaming service this week. Her new album, 1989, has since become the top-selling release of the year in the United States, with 1.3 million copies sold.

She told Yahoo!: "If I had streamed the new album, it's impossible to try to speculate what would have happened."

At a time of flagging album sales, the rise of streaming services such as Spotify feels like a "grand experiment", she said.

She told Yahoo!: "And I'm not wiling to contribute my life's work to an experiment that I don't feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music."

On Wednesday, The New York Times said Swift left Spotify because the service, which has free and paid versions, refused her request to stream her songs to paying users only. Her music is still available on services such as Google Play Music All Access, which have accepted her request, said the report.

She told Yahoo! she did not want to perpetuate "the perception that music has no value and should be free".

She said she had tried to be open-minded about releasing new songs such as Shake It Off on Spotify, but "it didn't feel right to me".

She told Yahoo!: "I felt like I was saying to my fans, 'If you create music someday, if you create a painting someday, someone can just walk into a museum, take it off the wall, rip off a corner off it, and it's theirs now and they don't have to pay for it.' I didn't like the perception that it was putting forth. And so I decided to change the way I was doing things."

1989 is Swift's fourth No.1 album on the Billboard 200 chart.