Spotify 60m Users, 15m Subs

Spotify has announced that it now has 60 million users worldwide, adding 10 million new users in the last two months of last year. This happened to be the same period in which the streaming giant endured ‘Swiftgate’, the message now being that this had little effect on the inexorable march of progress.

The figures, published by Spotify on their blog also state that their paying subscribers now number 15m. This is up from 12.5m in early November at the height of its on-going dispute with Taylor Swift, who removed all of her music from the service.

The service also celebrated with a fairly banal playlist and Music Business Worldwide  asked the pertinent question: Can the music industry live with Spotify?

The Gen asks: Actually, can the industry live without it? Spotify was already the biggest streaming game in town, with rival service Deezer weighing in at 16m users, six million of which are paying subscribers.

The Guardian reports that Spotify’s numbers were boosted by a pre-Christmas promotion that offered subscribers three months for $0.99 as opposed to the usual cost of $9.99. Who could ever accuse the great green saviours of dramatically devaluing music?

Back in November when the service was sparring with Swift, Founder Daniel Ek (pictured) espoused the values of the no-cost gateway to the garden of paid subscription, writing on the Spotify blog that over 80% of subscribers had started as free users.
Flaming, Ek continued (best imagined in a Goodfellas voice): “If you take away only one thing, it should be this: No free, no paid, no two billion dollars”.