Music Ally recently revealed financial report from Spotify Ltd in UK, which showed £16.66 million loss for 2009. When looking at the financial report for Spotify AB in Sweden the picture is quite different. While in UK Spotify's expenses exceeded their sales by more than £16 million, Swedish branch showed an income of 1,5M€ and a profit margin of 15,5%. Net sales for Spotify in Sweden were almost 10M€, which is almost as much as the sales numbers reported by Spotify in UK. The data for Spotify in Sweden did not include detailed break down of numbers for its subscription fees vs. add sales but the UK numbers suggest Spotify makes slightly more money from subscriptions.

Overall, 2009 was the first year Spotify had a positive turnover in Sweden, while making a considerable loss in UK. It should be noted, though, that UK branch of Spotify is responsible for most of the expansion of the service across Europe, which obviously cost them a lot of money. Given that the number of users increased tenfold since the beginning of 2009, that effort was not for nothing. According to Music Ally about 4% of Spotify subscribers pay for the service and it is said that among the 10 million current users about 650,000 of them pay monthly subsription fees. GigaOm also speculated that Spotify gained close to a 100M€ in 2010 and is expected to have an even more successful 2011 with a growing number of users as well as paying subscribers.

Image by Andreas Blixt