Spotify Doubled Its Market Share In 2011
According to reports by IFPI and some other data available, it seems that Spotify doubled its market share in 2011 as compared to 2010. And by market share we mean the global streaming music market as followed by International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).
Also, according to public records the company had filed in the UK we can tell Spotify's revenue was $99 million in 2010. Towards the end of 2010 they also shared that they had some 750 000 paying subscribers world wide. According to IFPI estimates, the global market for subscription services had about 8,2 millioin paying users. This yields Spotify a market share of around 9,1% in 2010.
Spotify Pushing Their API To Motivate Independent Developers
An OSX developer from Spotify's labs came out with a new third party desktop client for Spotify to show off the power of the libspotify and CocoaLibSpotify API features. The client, called Viva, is only runnable on Mac OSX Lion systems and with those with a Premium Spotify account. It can be downloaded from here, or you can view and build it from source on Github. With it, you get a quick and buggy version of Spotify, but with some notably missing features from the standard version such as a visualizer. To be honest, Viva really didn't work for me at all. It told me that every normal track wasn't playable in my area, but as a concept it does point to an early 2000's Winamp era of customization of features for Spotify.
Statistics On Scandinavian Music Streamers
A market survey conducted by Norstat for the WiMP music streaming service shows that roughly 3 out of 10 Norwegians and Swedes have listened to music by streaming in the week before the questioning took place. The survey was collected in January of 2012. In Norway, this proportion increased 20 to 29 percent from June of the past year, while Sweden saw a jump of 27 to 29 percent, showing the early saturation of the market. Danish users are behind the times, with a jump from 14 to a current 20%. This low penetration can likely be explained by Spotify only launching in Denmark in October.
Poor Royalties: Spotify Isn't The Problem, It's Music Business Itself
Helsingin Sanomat wrote an article on A.W. Yrjänä, the head of a successful Finnish rock band CMX, and how much money they made on Spotify and through record sales. Yrjänä is a multi-talent. Not only does he write and sing the vocals for their songs, but he also writes poems and books. He shares with us that Iäti, their album that came out in September 2010, wasn't really a huge success financially even though it shot to number one on the charts.
Spotify Approaches An Actively Drowning Industry
Daniel Ek has just been named by Forbes as the most important man in the music industry, and will be on the cover of Forbes' 30 under 30 issue going out on January 16th. It's not hard to see why he's receiving the hype, considering Spotify's disruption to the music industry and the explosion of growth the company has seen since it has expanded geographically. But one thing that struck me in the article was when Lorentzon had just quit his day job and put up 2 million in seed money, and Ek had already made his money but shed his riches. Steven Bertoni writes, "Lorentzon and Ek were in a unique place: The former no longer needed the money, and the latter no longer cared about it. So they decided to ignore the dollars and aim for disruption."
Interview With Harry Nelis Of Accel Partners (Video)
We talked to Harry Nelis, a partner at Accel Partners, about startups, entrepreneurship and Europe as well as many other topics. When we shot the video, Nelis had just come down from the main stage at LeWeb where he participated in the traditional Money Panel. Accel has been able to discover and invest into some of the most successful startups out there. Some of their portfolio companies include Facebook, Groupon, Spotify and the list goes on.
Spotify Finally Gets Updated Radio Features
Anyone who has used Pandora, Last.FM, or any other online radio knows that Spotify's radio features have been "lacking" to put it politely. I'm sure not too many people used the genre / decade buttons to build a station, but those who did likely noticed the same ten songs played over and over again. I appreciate how I can find every type of music imaginable on Spotify, but sometimes I just don't want to be in the driver's seat. Luckily, today Spotify has announced it has beefed up its radio features so you can build radio stations around the tracks or artists you select.
Spotify To Integrate Apps Within Its Application? (Updated)
Later this evening European time, Spotify is holding a Global Press Conference in NYC to announce "a new direction for the company". If the Wall Street Journal is to be believed, Spotify will announce a new push for third party apps to integrate with Spotify, starting with an "app finder" integrated into the service starting tomorrow. Right now we'll speculate away, but will also keep this post updated as more is announced.
(See updates below the fold):
Spotify Achieves Another Milestone, 2.5 Million Paying Subscribers And Growing
It appears to be a Spotify fest lately ever since the music streaming service announced their partnership with Facebook, bringing the service almost instantly to millions of Facebook users. Due to their reach in more countries, Spotify now announced they reached 2.5 million paying subscribers of the service.
While it would have been great if Spotify shared details on their user demographics, Spotify has kept this information in the shadows. What is more important here is that Spotify has managed to achieve this feat at a time where many listeners have been getting music for free from pirating. To have paying subscribers means that your users love the service and that they don’t mind paying a fee to avail more features, rather a “better user experience”.
Spotify Launched in Austria Today, Rumored To Launch In Belgium, Switzerland This Week
Guess it was the launch in the US that was holding back Spotify’s expansion in the rest of Europe. This is just a speculation but things have sped up recently, especially after the music streaming service shook hands with the world’s largest social network; Facebook. After launching in Austria today, as per the latest reports, Spotify is planning its launch in Belgium and Switzerland this week.
We haven’t had confirmed news regarding this expansion but things have been pretty favorable for us to believe it. There have been hints about the expansion of Spotify in other regions as well, which include; Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, Germany and New Zealand. We think this expansion is bound to happen and that Spotify will be available in many regions within and outside Europe in a few months time.
Spotify Brings Music Streaming To Windows Phone 7 Devices
Today, Spotify is trying to rapidly expand to every platform. The music streaming service has had things moving in the right direction, and the deal with Facebook seems to have supercharged its expansion. Last week Spotify announced the release of the Spotify app for the Windows Phone 7 devices. Big news and another platform to grow with, and there seems to be no stopping for the service.
The application is branded in the stylish WP7 Metro style, and is available for almost all the Windows Phone 7 devices. It has all the major features that every Spotify user would love, including:
Spotify Expands To Denmark
Spotify has just announced its expansion to Denmark. It's probably been one of the countries with a lot of anticipation for the Swedish company to announce its expansion there. While Denmark isn't a huge market place, it's definitely a step Spotify needed to take - it needs to work in all markets to make it a consumer favorite.
Spotify Shakes Hands With Western Digital To Bring WD TV Live
About two weeks ago we reported on Facebook integrating Spotify to the social network for music streaming. A partnership that had mixed reaction from across the globe given that Spotify isn’t available in every region. At the end of last week, Spotify stretched itself further into our living rooms by announcing its partnership with Western Digital.
Business Insider: The Top 100 Digital Startups
Business Insider has gathered a list of 100 companies from all around the world (these lists are always skewed a little and it's almost impossible to make them globally valid). The list is naturally ranked with lots of US based startups, but quite a few Nordic ones are on the list as well. Company valuation is used to organise the companies.
Facebook Adds Spotify Integration, Spotify Returns The Favor: Requires Facebook Login
Last week's Thursday saw Mark Zuckerberg present a ton of new things at the Facebook developer conference f8 that will hit Facebook in the coming months. One of the additions, that was immediately enabled was the deep partnership with Spotify. For those who love to listen to music in a social way, this is heaven. You're able to dive into your friends' music habits whenever you're in Facebook. There are a couple of downsides to this and the most important one isn't the fact that your Facebook stream is a flush of Spotify updates. It's actually the fact that with the integration - Spotify has disabled any other sign-in method and now requires new users to have Facebook accounts. This is a huge gamble for the Sweden based music company that could backfire on it.
The Mobile App Juggernaut Is Only Just Beginning
Editorial note: This is a guest post by Aman Ghei, an early/growth stage Investor at Accel Partners. You can follow him on twitter with @amanghei.
There’s a lot of noise lately about whether or not mobile apps are sustainable, or have any future. But so far, and despite some real challenges and issues, mobile apps have been nothing short of success.
The challenges for developers working on mobile apps range from visibility and pick up rates to loyalty and monetization. The majority of revenue generated by app stores today still comes from the top 100 apps and the “long tail” is often ignored. As the demand for smartphone real estate increases, the cost of acquiring new mobile customers is rising rapidly as well. Seamless payment and customer acquisition methods are other big challenges that apps are struggling to solve. Not to mention how inhomogeneous the two leading platforms - iOS and Android- are.
Spotify Vs Indie Labels
This week Spotify found itself under attack from indie labels, resulting in at least one of them (Century Media) taking their content off the music-streaming service. Their biggest criticism: Spotify pays next to nothing to independent labels. The owner of a New York-based independent label Mode Records, Brian Brandt, also shared that for 11,335 streams through Spotify they earned a meagre $36.98 (which still needs to be divided between composers and artists). In comparison, physical sales (which, according to Brian, still make up most of their sales) bring in $3-4 per sold CD. Thus, indendent label owners say in chorus, Spotify is destructive for their business. As Brian puts it: 'While the major labels and pop music may be able to reap a real income stream from Spotify simply due to the sheer volume of streams, the Spotify model is not financially sustainable for any indie niche label'.
Spotify To Launch In The US Today
Spotify has just announced via a press release that they will launch their service in the US today. There has been very little information given out and they plan to announce more information around 14.00 CET. The move has been an anticipated one and not an easy one for Spotify. It has been rumored that it has taken this long due to negotiations with the record labels among other issues. Nevertheless, this could seriously drive Spotify's revenues north during the rest of the year.
Paper: Spotify Worth 1.6B Euro
The Swedish business paper Dagens Industri has written that they consider Spotify, the crown jewel of the Swedish internet companies currently, to be valued at around 1.6B euros (or 15 billion Swedish crowns). The paper values Spotify in comparison to the recent IPO of Pandora, which was valued at almost 3.5 billion dollars at IPO. The stock fell below its IPO price of $17 and closed yesterday at $13.26.
Facebook And Spotify Rumored To Partner To Bring Music Streaming To The Social Network
This is definitely making things for Spotify as (unconfirmed) reports rolled out that Facebook will be launching a music streaming service. This is expected to be launched in the first week of June. The service is currently being tested and upon launch will have users of the social network seeing a Spotify icon just beneath the Photos and other links on the left hand side.
Spotify Enables iPod Syncing, Aims To Replace iTunes
Spotify has taken a major step forward today with the announcment of their new feature to enable iPod syncing. Previously, the company has enabled mobile syncing to only premium customers, but today - that too is being opened up to everybody. However, it isn't quite what you're expecting. Spotify mobile opening up to everybody basically means that you're able to use the mobile application to play your own MP3-files and sync them to the application from your computer. Nevertheless, this is a big step forward for Spotify in being the "one-music-application to rule them all".
Spotify To Limit Free Account In Search Of Better Monetisation
Spotify announced today that they will limit the Spotify Free account from May 1st in a few different ways. The reason behind all this is naturally to further monetise and convert those using Spotify Free to the premium accounts. At the end of March, the company also announced, as part of its move to further monetise the user base, to give all new premium subscribers a free 7-day test of the service before billing anything.
Rdio Looking To Avoid Apple's 30% Cut With APIs
Rdio, the online music straming company founded by the former Skype founders, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, has announced that they will be releasing a set of APIs to developers, according to ReadWriteWeb. This comes as an attempt to try and go around Apple's counter announcement of them charging 30% of new subscribers that will come through their iPhone apps, a move which has been widely criticized for "killing the online music business". Margins are very low and online streaming services such as Rdio (and Spotify for that matter) are scrambling to find new ways to keep the business model afloat.
Spotify: One Million Paying Customers
Spotify has announced today that they have reached the point of one million simultaneous customers. This is huge. The company launched its service just some two years ago and they now have million simultaneous customers and over 10 million registered users altogether. However, Peter Kafka from AllThingsD states that Spotify has some 7 million active users in its service, yielding a whopping 15% conversion rate for their service.
Spotify's Progress is Significant For Northern Europe
In the previous post with Nexit Ventures we talked about the maths behind venture capital. In the post we basically outlined with the help of very basic level maths and assumptions why venture capitalists aim for ten fold returns on their investments. As the business of venture capital and risky investments is mainly a hit business, similar to the music industry - big hits and home runs are needed every time. In this light, there are a handful of companies in the region that have a huge significance to the valuation of the ecosystem itself.
Spotify In Talks With DST About Funding?
TechCrunch has heard from their sources that apparently DST, the Russian originated investment company, is in talks with Spotify to close a large funding round. While all this is still unconfirmed, the round could be valued at $100 million. In total, the company has raised financing of over $80 million to this day. Having followed DST somewhat closely here at ArcticStartup, this would strike more of a natural continuum for DST instead of something out of the blue.
Spotify Second Largest Source Of Revenue In Europe For Labels
Recent IFPI report on digital music reveals the size of Spotify in Europe and how much money it's actually churning for the record labels. The report also stated that on a European level, Spotify is the second single largest source of digital music revenue for record labels. This means that 2010 saw dramatic increase in its usage as well as payouts to record labels and artists themselves.
Spotify Sails Closer To US, Signs Deal With Sony
Europe’s most popular music streaming service, Spotify is finally edging closer to cross the ocean and land into the US market with rumors of it attempting to sign deals with major labels in the US market. Last week Peter Kafka hinted that it might have struck the cords with Sony US. This will be a distribution deal and wouldn’t necessarily steer clear Spotify to invade the US market.
Spotify Scores Another Deal, This Time With Shazam
It appears I have booked myself to news on Spotify. But let the truth be known that there is nothing of the sort and like any decent writer, I am just sharing what makes news. The latest from Spotify is its deal with Shazam.
Hi-Fi Spotify! Logitech, Spotify Deal To Stream Music Anywhere In Your Home
Spotify has had its sets of issues with its launch in the US thanks to the demands of the leading record labels, but the free music streaming service is growing leaps and bounds in Europe. Of course it's pointless for Spotify to boast about European success, they are at least able to leverage their lead in Europe.
