It’s been a big few weeks in the digital music world, with Google taking the headlines for the launch of it’s much anticipated digital music service.
But not to be shadowed by Google, Spotify announced earlier this week that it’s hit a major milestone – 2.5 million paying subscribers.
The Swedish company has struggled to attract paying customers in the past, but the number of people paying for Spotify’s Premium service has rocketed of late, with 500,000 people signing up in little over two months. This surge in growth is undoubtedly attributed to two main factors, its US roll out and Facebook integration.
Spotify’s deal with Facebook means that all new users must first have a Facebook account in order to access Spotify, and once inside, recently played songs on Spotify are fed in to the news feed and ticker making the service extremely visible within the social network.
This involuntary social sharing inevitably raised a few privacy issues (uncovering a lot of closet Bieber fans), but Spotify has since added a ‘private listening’ mode to avoid any further public embarrassment. *Phew.
Minor privacy backlash aside, the Facebook-Spotify relationship seems to be working out well; it’s estimated that Spotify has attracted 5 million new users since it integrated with the social network.
More recently, Spotify has also rolled out in a host of new countries, increasing its reach further still.
In the same announcement blog post, Spotify hints that something big could be just around the corner, “We’ve got some exciting developments in the works, which we’ll share with you very soon.”
Exactly what those exciting developments are is still unclear, but stay tuned for updates.
As the battle for digital music domination reaches an all time high, it seems that all involved are doing their upmost to secure our custom.
Earlier this week I received this message from Amazon;
A good effort, but hardly an incentive. Read in to Amazon’s ‘offer week’ as you will, but at least the company is doing something, which is more than can be said for the ever-complacent iTunes.
Surely now more than ever is the time for digital music companies to be showing their customers a bit of love? So iTunes, if you’re listening, anything from my wish list will do nicely, thanks.
