Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Spotify Up to 5 Million Paid Subscribers

Spotify has 5 million subscribers and 20 million users, CEO Daniel Ek announced at a press event in New York.

In July, the company said it had 4 million paying subscribers and 15 million active users worldwide. That was up from 3 million paid subscribers last January and 1.5 million in the summer of 2011, right before the company arrived in the U.S.

Ek said 1 million of the company’s paid subscribers are now in the U.S. “We’ve been growing like crazy,” he deadpanned.

Spotify is likely to announce some new product stuff today as well — very likely along the lines of the stuff TechCrunch reported last month, though prior to the event, the Spotify staff was promising attendees that they were going to hear some truly significant news. So we’ll see.

Regardless, the numbers are a crucial marker for the company, which has made more headway than anyone else in the music subscription business, but which needs to get a whole lot further to justify its $3 billion valuation.

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There’s a lot of attention and PR around Marissa, but their product lineup just kind of blows.

— Om Malik on Bloomberg TV, talking about Yahoo, the September issue of Vogue Magazine, and our overdependence on Google