A month ago, I posted an initial list of speakers for the 10th D: All Things Digital conference.

After a decade, the event — which is held in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., just south of Los Angeles, at the end of May — has attracted another amazing group of speakers, including: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, who will appear with Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek; Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus; Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz; LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman, who will appear with the social business site’s CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

Now, here’s another group of stellar speakers we’ve added to the programming lineup (and there are still even more big names to come in the weeks ahead): Oracle CEO Larry Ellison; former tech analyst superstar and now VC Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins; Intellectual Ventures’ Nathan Myhrvold; Pixar co-founder and Disney animation head Dr. Ed Catmull; and Visa President John Partridge.

Larry Ellison, CEO and founder of the enterprise giant Oracle, needs little introduction, as one of tech’s highest profile figures and a true Silicon Valley icon. Frankly, I think the short bio that’s on Oracle’s Web site says it all: “Larry Ellison has been CEO of Oracle Corporation since he founded the company in 1977. He also races sailboats, flies planes, and plays tennis and guitar.” There will be a lot to talk about with the voluble and always entertaining exec — who appeared at the D conference once before many years ago — from the current state of the tech industry to insights to where it’s all going. (In addition, Ellison has agreed to appear on a panel we are doing as a tribute to his close friend, Apple’s former CEO Steve Jobs.)

Another well-known tech figure is Meeker, who is now a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, having joined the storied venture capital firm in early 2011. She focuses there on investments in its digital practice and via KP’s Digital Growth Fund, working with companies such as Spotify, Jawbone and One King’s Lane. But Meeker is perhaps best known for her long stint — 1991 to 2010 — as a star Internet research analyst at Morgan Stanley, where she brought many of the Internet’s great companies to the attention of Wall Street and beyond. She also wrote a series of groundbreaking reports on the landscape. That includes her annual “State of the Internet,” which Meeker will debut this year at the conference in an extended demo of her always riveting Internet trends presentation.

Nathan Myhrvold is also a tech legend, having worked for 14 years as chief strategist and CTO of Microsoft. But, instead of retiring, the avid inventor decided to focus on patents, founding and leading a controversial company called Intellectual Ventures, which buys them up and licenses them out (or sues if it doesn’t sell). With all the mishegas around patents right now, it’s a good time to have Myhrvold back to explain it all and perhaps to take some of the blame for the explosion in intellectual property lawsuits. (Myhrvold also co-authored a cookbook, “Modernist Cuisine,” so we hope we will also get some sort of futuristic cooking demo. Perhaps, Patently Delicious Flan?)

Speaking of tasty, the animation from Pixar over the years has been just that and it’s been one of Disney’s greatest acquisitions. Given how much Pixar has contributed to animation technology, we are glad to finally get Dr. Ed Catmull onstage. As co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, he will discuss where entertainment and technology are intersecting and where they are not. Catmull is a geek’s geek in the industry — having also founded the computer graphics laboratory at the New York Institute of Technology, the computer division of Lucasfilm, as well as Pixar, which he did with chief creative officer John Lasseter. Get ready to talk about image compositing, motion blur, subdivision surfaces, cloth simulation and rendering techniques, texture mapping and the z-buffer. Also, Catmull’s five Academy Awards.

Lastly, it is perfect timing for bringing on John Partridge, president of Visa. With swirling issues around online identity theft, digital privacy, the future of money and the rise of upstart competitors such as Square, Partridge has his hands full at the credit card giant. One of the most neglected arenas in tech, the way we manage payments is perhaps the biggest story of the next era, especially as it relates to mobile and the rise of smartphones as all-purpose devices.

Shakil Khan, the well-known head of special projects for the popular Spotify music service, is taking a job with the same title at Path, the fast-growing personal social networking start-up.

Khan will be focusing on growth and international issues, and based out of London but with global duties. Path’s HQ is in San Francisco.

That’s important, since Path has been growing strongly outside its initial U.S. market, especially in Asia. In February, Path CEO Dave Morin announced that it had two million users.

In an interview last night, Khan said he will remain an adviser to Spotify’s CEO and co-founder Daniel Ek, noting that he is also an investor.

Interestingly, said many sources and also a number of reports, both Path and Spotify are in the midst of large funding rounds with hefty valuations.

In fact, Spotify is being valued at $4 billion, which was not the case when Khan came to the then-fledgling company in 2008. Taking up a job essentially as a kind of fix-it guy for Ek, he worked on a number of important initiatives, from gaining early user traction to hiring its early management to wrangling celebrities to use the service.

Khan said that he decided to leave Spotify, which has recently had a huge spurt of growth due to its recent integration on Facebook, because he has “always been a start-up guy.”

“I loved the days when people used to say, ‘What is that, how do you spell it,’” he said about Spotify. “I need those kind of butterflies, and Path is just that kind of amazing product with huge global potential.”

In an email, Path’s Morin said:

“We are beyond delighted that Shak has chosen to join the Path family as we continue our mission to build the first global personal network by helping people journal and share life with family and close friends. Shak brings a unique global perspective and skill set to Path which will help us reach and serve our members and partners across the globe in a uniquely personal way.”

And Ek, calling in from Sweden (where it is 80 degrees!), said that he was sad to see Khan go, and was also in his debt for his service to Spotify.

“I am kind of an introvert guy, and Shak is definition of social, so he was the link to the rest of the world in many ways for me and for the company,” said Ek. “So where he is going and what he will be doing at Path is perfect.”

And in 2012 — which also happens to be the 10th anniversary of the confab of tech and media titans — it’s already shaping up to be another fantastic event in terms of programming, with a lineup of onstage appearances that is sure to make some news.

There are many more very big names to come, but Walt Mossberg and I are pleased to introduce the first group of interviewees, which will give you a glimpse into the firepower we expect at D10 in late May. It is again being held in Rancho Palos Verdes, just south of Los Angeles.

The initial speakers we have confirmed so far include: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, who will appear with Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek; Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus; Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz; LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman, who will appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

It’s hard to imagine someone we have wanted to have onstage more than Michael Bloomberg, a man of many talents and interests. He’s known worldwide as the 108th Mayor of the City of New York. First elected in November 2001 (and again in 2005 and 2009), he is also one of the most compelling politicians in the U.S. today.

But Bloomberg is also a pioneer in terms of the business of digital news and information technology, having built a huge and groundbreaking media company and information service. Bloomberg (the company) has 310,000 subscribers to its financial news and information service, and more than 15,000 employees worldwide.

There will be a lot to talk about with him, from the upcoming presidential election to the state of our government to the future of innovation, news and technology.

Also sure to be voluble is Sean Parker, the legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has been on the cutting edge of innumerable important digital trends of the recent decade. In 1999, Parker co-founded Napster, the controversial and industry-changing music service, at the age of 19.

He followed up with early contact information service Plaxo, and then shifted over to his critical involvement as founding president of Facebook in its early days as a start-up, an experience which was dramatized in the movie “The Social Network.” Parker continued to found and also invest in companies, from Causes to Spotify to his most recent, Airtime, a social video company that he is doing with his Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning.

Parker will be appearing onstage with Daniel Ek, another serial entrepreneur and technologist, who started his first company in 1997 at the age of 14. The Swedish native later co-founded online music phenom Spotify in 2006, with Martin Lorentzon.

The former CTO of Stardoll and founder of Advertigo leads a company that is changing the way music is delivered and consumed by fans, against a backdrop of intense change in the industry, succeeding even as a plethora of other services have stumbled.

Also a groundbreaker is Zynga CEO and founder Mark Pincus, yet another serial entrepreneur, whose latest effort in the online gaming arena has finally resulted in his biggest success. It recently went public, and now has a nearly $10 billion market cap.

Before founding Zynga in 2007, Pincus had already started three other companies: Push start-up Freeloader in 1995; automated tech-support company Support.com after that; and early social networking site Tribe.net in 2003.

(I met Pincus when he was at Freeloader in Washington, D.C., while writing a profile of him for the Washington Post, so I have enjoyed tracking his progress since then.)

Pincus is also an avid angel investor, with early stakes in Napster, Brightmail, Twitter and Facebook.

Reid Hoffman was another early investor in Facebook, along with many of Web 2.0’s most successful ventures. Well-known in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur and VC, and recently dubbed the “start-up whisperer” by the New York Times (although I am not sure exactly what that means), he’s also chairman of LinkedIn, the business-networking service that also recently went public (at a $10 billion valuation, too).

He’ll appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, who started out life in Hollywood, but soon made his way to Silicon Valley as a top exec at Yahoo. After running its media division, Weiner spent a short time at venture firms before going operational again at LinkedIn.

What it takes to build and maintain momentum as tech companies move into more mature stages, as well as how the social networking space evolves, are among the many topics on tap for the pair.

The evolution of a start-up phenom — in this case, Internet telephony service Skype — will be among the topics covered by Tony Bates, who is now a president at Microsoft, which bought it last year.

As such, he is responsible, says the software giant in its description of his job, “for overseeing the company’s direction, strategy and overall mission to become a global communications service that will eventually reach billions of users.”

That’s a tall order for Bates, who came to Skype from a top job at Cisco. Bates has deep roots (or maybe, routing?) in the guts of the Internet, having done backbone-engineering strategy for Internet MCI. The U.K. native also holds nine patents.

Lastly, given all the activity we expect will happen between government regulatory agencies and tech companies over the next few years, we felt it was key to bring in FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. He has been at the FTC as a commissioner since 2004, but was given the top job by President Barack Obama in 2009.

Among his priorities, according to his bio, is “promoting competition and innovation in the technology sector through law enforcement and policy initiatives; and protecting consumers’ privacy — especially while they are using the Internet.”

Uh-oh!

Leibowitz knows from regulation, having served as the Democratic chief counsel and staff director for the U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee from 1997 to 2000, where he focused on competition policy and telecommunications matters, as well as a similar stint at the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism and Technology before that.

There will be a lot more speakers to come, of course. But, so far, we think D10 is off and running fast.

But for now, at least, he can claim a bragging right that Spotify’s Daniel Ek doesn’t have: The CEO of Rhapsody has more paying subscribers than any other digital music service in the U.S.

Probably, that is. We can get into the numbers in a minute. But at the very least, Irwin argues, his company ought to get a bit of the attention that Spotify does.

They’re both doing the same thing, after all — trying to get consumers to pony up $10 a month for an ad-free service that lets you listen to any music you want, on your iPhone or (just about) any other device.

The big difference between the two is that while Rhapsody offers users a free trial period to sample the service, Ek’s company will let you listen to music for free forever.

That offer comes with advertising, and some restrictions — you can only do it for a certain number of hours per month, and you can’t take it with you. But that free offer, in conjunction with a big push from Facebook, is the real reason that so many people have heard about Spotify recently. Free, legal music is a pretty compelling offer.

Why hasn’t Rhapsody gone that route? Irwin has a long answer for that, but the short one is that he doesn’t think Spotify’s freemium model can convert enough subscribers to cover the costs of the music it gives away. The Spotify camp argues otherwise, but we’re not going to get an authoritative answer for some time.

In the meantime, Irwin can take can comfort in the fact that he has more Americans paying for his service than Ek does.

He thinks. Irwin says he passed the one-million mark at the end of last year. And while Spotify hasn’t broken out its U.S. subscriber total, we can guess that it has less than that. At the end of November, it said that it had 2.5 million paying subscribers worldwide. That’s 900,000 more than the 1.6 million it said it had in June, and that growth hasn’t all come in the U.S., because Facebook has been promoting the service everywhere.

Now, back to the future. Spotify is likely to keep growing for a while, thanks to that Facebook firehose, as well as international expansion — my bet is that Ek opens shop in Germany fairly soon.

But Irwin thinks that both companies are going to end up needing help from partners with much bigger reach — cable guys like Comcast, or wireless giants like Verizon — if they’re going to get real scale.

He explains in this interview we conducted yesterday at the Consumer Electronics Show:

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120112/why-rhapsody-is-probably-bigger-than-spotify-in-the-u-s/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111130/spotify-tries-a-facebook-smart/ http://allthingsd.com/20111130/spotify-tries-a-facebook-smart/#comments Wed, 30 Nov 2011 17:51:54 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=148717 Nope, it’s not Music Everywhere. If you want to listen to music on Spotify, you’ve still got to use Spotify’s software.

But if you do use Spotify, you’ll now have a lot of new bells and whistles to play with, courtesy of outside developers the music service has invited onto its platform, using a new Facebook-like strategy it unveiled this afternoon.

(Let’s get this out of the way: The WSJ’s Ethan Smith got this right last night. I got it wrong on Monday, when I predicted that the company would open its music to developers who wanted to play its songs on their own outside apps. I could note that I hedged my theory up the wazoo, or argue that I’m “directionally correct,” because Spotify seems to be headed that way eventually. But for now, those are just synonyms for “not right.” My apologies.)

This is a smart move by CEO Daniel Ek, for the same reason that most platforms are theoretically smart moves — it lets Spotify improve its product without having to do the work itself. Instead, outsiders add cool new features that keep current users happy. They may also generate a bit of extra revenue while they’re at it, and they’ll share some of that with Ek.

And Spotify can use the help, as Ek admitted onstage. For instance, while Spotify is a great place to find music you want, it’s not very good at all about helping you find music you didn’t know you want. So curation apps from the likes of CBS’s Last.fm and Rolling Stone magazine can help with that. (Meanwhile, we should note that neither Apple nor Amazon, the two biggest players in digital music, are good at this, either).

Ek, who shares backers and advisers with Facebook, wore a Zuckerbergian hoodie to unveil his “new direction” today. And a revamped version of his software now looks a bit more Facebookian, too, with an activity feed/ticker along the right side of the page.

And, like the Facebook platform, the Spotify plan may help keep users on the service that much longer — so they can see more ads, or eventually decide that they’d like to pay a monthly fee to not see ads, or to make the music portable.

But I don’t think the new features will bring Spotify any more users. One way to do that would be to let developers play Spotify’s tunes on their own apps — so that, say, someone who uses Soundtracking to tell friends about cool new music could let them hear an entire track, instead of a 30-second sample.

And developers I’ve talked to think Spotify is indeed going to try to pull that off. But that will likely take some more haggling with the music labels, among other sticky hurdles. So I wouldn’t expect it anytime soon.

For now, this is a good way to make a service that 10 million people seem to enjoy that much better.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111130/spotify-tries-a-facebook-smart/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111006/you-know-whats-really-cool-spotify/ http://allthingsd.com/20111006/you-know-whats-really-cool-spotify/#comments Thu, 06 Oct 2011 07:01:17 +0000 Bo Kim http://allthingsd.com/?p=129229

In order to create the next revolution in digital music I believe that you must BOTH meet and exceed the bar set by Napster a decade ago. You guys have finally done it.

Sean Parker, in an August 25, 2009, email to Daniel Ek and Shakil Khan of Spotify

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111006/you-know-whats-really-cool-spotify/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110725/spotify-says-reed-hastings-loves-lady-gaga-and-mark-zuckerberg-hearts-green-day/ http://allthingsd.com/20110725/spotify-says-reed-hastings-loves-lady-gaga-and-mark-zuckerberg-hearts-green-day/#comments Mon, 25 Jul 2011 19:29:06 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=102289 Spotify, the jukebox service now rolling out via invite in the U.S., has a neat feature where users can publish and subscribe to each other’s playlists.

You have to love that tech leaders like Reed Hastings and Mark Zuckerberg are partaking in public playlists and revealing that some of their mutual favorite listens are Madonna, Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift. (Did guilty pleasure pop music help break the ice when the Netflix CEO recently agreed to join the Facebook board?)

Hastings’s “LoveGame” playlist does have Gaga, but it’s also a mix of older and sentimental favorites like Cat Stevens’s “Wild World” and Savage Garden’s “Truly Madly Deeply.”

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg has some artist-specific playlists for favorites like Green Day and Jay-Z, as well as a curated mix of Top 40 stuff called “Like a G6.”

Facebook and Spotify have a close corporate relationship, and many other Facebookers appear to be active Spotify users. Facebook CTO Bret Taylor’s “Good Songs” includes selections from Death Cab for Cutie and The Shins, while VP of Product Chris Cox has curated an extensive collection of “Island Music.”

Quora’s Mark Bodnick has an impressive 75 public playlists, including lots of hip hop and a little bit of “Glee.”

Napster founders Sean Parker (an active investor in Spotify) and Shawn Fanning both have a bunch of playlists up, including Parker’s “effervescent groove” and Fanning’s “Prozac Plz.”

YouTube co-founder Steve Chen has a country playlist titled “Always On My Mind” and YouTube Director of Product Management Hunter Walk has a 218-track long “Hip Hopps” mix.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek is of course an active user of his own service, with 198 public playlists, including some Swedish music and the slightly TMI “My girl.”

(Turntable.fm, another social music service, has also been enthusiastically used by tech folks, though you have to jump into a room in real-time to experience other users’ DJ choices.)

On the topic of social music, Ek said last week at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference that “in general people are comfortable sharing their music.” But he added: “It has two exceptions, though: Lady Gaga and Britney Spears.”

Not always!

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110725/spotify-says-reed-hastings-loves-lady-gaga-and-mark-zuckerberg-hearts-green-day/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110525/chill-out-spotify-on-facebook-is-cool-not-a-game-changer/ http://allthingsd.com/20110525/chill-out-spotify-on-facebook-is-cool-not-a-game-changer/#comments Wed, 25 May 2011 19:56:37 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=78229 Are Facebook and Spotify linking up? Entirely possible.

But before we get too excited about the prospect, here’s what a Facebook/Spotify pact would likely look like: Instead of using Spotify’s software to play music, Facebook users could access Spotify from a Facebook Web page and listen to some music for free.

And here’s what a Facebook/Spotify pact likely wouldn’t look like: Unlimited free music for Facebook users.

In other words, if Facebook and Spotify do deepen their relationship, it will be a nice feature for Facebook and a nice promotional outlet for Spotify. And if Spotify CEO Daniel Ek (pictured at right) ever does open for business in the U.S., it’d be a good way to introduce Americans to his service.

But it will still be the same service: A limited amount of free music, and the option to upgrade to a paid subscription.

Or put it another way: Let’s say Rdio linked up with Skype to promote its streaming music service, a not-unlikely scenario. Does that sound like the kind of thing that would freak out Apple?

Right. So take a breath.

Talks of a Facebook and Spotify partnership have bubbled up since last year, and they’ve been popping up again this spring. And neither Facebook nor Spotify are trying to bat down today’s Forbes report of an imminent linkup (they’re not even trying to call it a “rumor”).

But everyone I talk to who knows Facebook, Spotify and the music business says the following things haven’t changed:

• Facebook isn’t interested in negotiating with music labels to create its own music service, or paying a third party to provide their own. Instead, Mark Zuckerberg and company are interested in letting others set up shop on their platform, and perhaps sharing revenue–via credits, ad dollars, whatever.
• The music labels aren’t interested in letting Spotify promote itself by giving away lots of free music–in fact, they’ve been pressuring Spotify to give away less. Spotify used to let anyone listen to as many tunes as they wanted, gratis, but then cut that back to 20 hours a month. Last month, they cut that back again, to 10 hours a month. Unless Spotify is going pay the labels more money, that’s not going to change.
• The money Spotify does have is going into marketing, and paying the labels for the right to launch in the U.S., which it still can’t do yet because it still doesn’t have the deals it needs.

So, if Spotify wants to use Facebook as an alternative to its own desktop client, it can do that–that’s a software/product issue to hammer out. Perhaps it’s the kind of thing that Ek had on his mind when All Things D‘s eagled-eyed Drake Martinet spotted the London-based Swede in Palo Alto earlier this month. But it’s not in a position to do anything more.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110525/chill-out-spotify-on-facebook-is-cool-not-a-game-changer/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110325/spotify-still-hiring-but-not-launching-yet-in-the-u-s/ http://allthingsd.com/20110325/spotify-still-hiring-but-not-launching-yet-in-the-u-s/#comments Fri, 25 Mar 2011 12:20:07 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=31171 Most Americans still can’t access Spotify. But some of them can get jobs from the European music streaming service, which is continuing to staff up its New York office in advance of a U.S. launch.

The company has brought on Steve Savoca, who ran digital at U.K. indie label Domino Records, to run its U.S. content business. He’ll join, among others, Ken Parks, a former attorney for EMI Music who has been running Spotify’s New York outpost for a couple years; and at least two veterans from Limewire, the now-defunct file sharing service.

And Spotify CEO Daniel Ek would like you to know that the company is still looking for “rockstar engineers and product people” in the U.S., too. (You’re welcome, Daniel.)

Spotify still doesn’t have a U.S. launch date, though, because it still doesn’t have all the music label deals it needs. Sony and EMI have signed on, but the company still hasn’t inked a pact with Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest music company. It’d be nice if Warner Music Group were on board, too.

It’s increasingly likely that by the time Spotify does open up shop in the U.S., it will face competition from not just other streaming music services like Rdio, Rhapsody and MOG, but a new offering from Google.

Google wants to operate a “locker” music service which gives users access to all of their personal music files from a cloud-based server, and has begun testing the service internally. But just like Spotify, Google can’t launch without label deals–or, at least, it doesn’t want to launch without label deals–and so far it doesn’t have anything locked down.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110325/spotify-still-hiring-but-not-launching-yet-in-the-u-s/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110307/spotify-toots-its-own-horn-one-million-paying-subscribers/ http://allthingsd.com/20110307/spotify-toots-its-own-horn-one-million-paying-subscribers/#comments Tue, 08 Mar 2011 02:01:23 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=30479 Nope, Spotify still isn’t in the U.S. yet. But the European streaming music service does have something to announce. It has a million paying subscribers, CEO Daniel Ek writes in a blog post.

Truth in blog posts about blog posts: The number isn’t news. The company hasn’t disclosed the milestone before, but it tells me it passed the one million mark about a month ago. Which happens to be when I first noted it.

Still it’s a number worth boasting about. It makes Spotify the biggest paid music service in the world, by a large margin.

U.S.-based Rhapsody, Spotify’s closest competitor, has recently said it’s at the 750,000-subscriber mark. But newer players like MOG and Rdio are much, much smaller; Thumbplay had 20,000 subscribers before it gave up.

Spotify’s critics will note the service has an advantage its competitors don’t have — the ability to give listeners many free days of music every month, instead of the 3-day free trial the others usually offer.

That free music is also one of the big sticking points in the company’s negotiations to get to the U.S., which have dragged on for two years. The big music labels worry the free tunes will kill off what’s rest of their music sales, without a replacement revenue stream.

If Spotify takes much longer to get to the U.S., it may find the competition has gotten in ahead of it. Google is trying to launch its own music store along with a digital “locker” that will let users store all of their music in the cloud. That’s not as exciting as Spotify’s all-you-can eat offering, but it’s going to be a whole lot cheaper. Spotify would likely run about $10 a month in the U.S., where Google’s locker may be $3 a month, or less.

Meanwhile Apple is looking to launch a much more limited locker service of its own. That one would only allow users to access songs they’ve purchased from iTunes, which is a tiny subset of most peoples’ collections, but it’s still competition. And a yet-to-launch music startup called Beyond Oblivion has just raised a staggering $77 million from investors including News Corp. (which also owns this Web site).

Which is perhaps why the company is also disclosing some other numbers beyond Ek’s post. Paid subscribers are growing at 2x the rate of free users, says Kenneth Parks, who oversees North America for Spotify (the company has a small, but growing, staff in NYC).

Parks also says the million paying subs represent about 15 percent of Spotify’s active user base, defined as people who have used the service in the last 30 days.

That puts Spotify’s active user base at about 7 million. That’s lower than the 10 million registered user number it has previously talked about, but Spotify correctly argues that active users is a more helpful metric. It’s good enough for Facebook, among others.

Next task: Convincing at least one more big music label — specifically, Vivendi’s Universal Music Group — to give Spotify a U.S. distribution deal, so Americans can figure out if they want to pay up, too.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110307/spotify-toots-its-own-horn-one-million-paying-subscribers/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110119/one-down-spotify-signs-sony-to-us-deal/ http://allthingsd.com/20110119/one-down-spotify-signs-sony-to-us-deal/#comments Thu, 20 Jan 2011 00:18:03 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=28295 This doesn’t get them into the States, but it gets them a lot closer: Music service Spotify has finally signed with Sony for a U.S. distribution deal. Multiple sources tell me the deal, which has been very close since last fall, is now closed.

I’m told the terms call for a U.S. service that more or less mirrors the one Spotify offers in Europe: A certain number of hours per month of free streaming music, with the ability to pay for an ad-free version, or a more popular one that lets users listen on mobile devices like Apple’s iPhone.

Both Spotify and Sony declined to comment.

The deal doesn’t mean a U.S. launch is imminent for the service, which has been trying to make the leap from Europe for a couple of years, and which missed a self-imposed deadline to make it over in 2010. In order to make a credible offer to U.S. customers, it will need at least two of the three other big music labels to sign on.

And practically, at least one of those labels has to be Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest music label. So Spotify will need to hammer out a deal with UMG and either Warner Music Group or EMI before we can start talking about a U.S. launch date.

The New York Post reported last week that Spotify was close to a Sony deal.

What’s taking Spotify so long to land in the U.S.? Depends on whom you ask.

Some industry sources tell me the big music labels are genuinely worried that Spotify’s free streaming service will increase the decline of CD sales, which have been dropping for a decade, but still make up the majority of the labels’ revenue.

Others have a more cynical take, though it’s not mutually exclusive: The labels, which have already licensed Spotify in Europe, simply want more cash from the company before they do an American deal. There is also muttering that the labels don’t want to upset Apple, which sells tunes on a track-by-track basis via its iTunes store and dominates the market for digital music.

It’s also unclear how close Spotify is to more label deals. Executives at the service have long been hopeful that getting one deal done would convince the other labels to join up. On the other hand, you could argue that it gives the holdouts that much more leverage.

And in any case, even if Spotify signed two more labels tomorrow, it would still take the company some time to cross the Atlantic, as it prepares a marketing campaign, etc.

It might also be nice for the company to have a new slug of cash on hand, something it would have if it goes through with fundraising talks it has been holding recently.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek talked to me about some of these issues, in a general and noncommittal way, at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference last month. You can see an abbreviated version of our chat below, or you can watch the whole thing here.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110119/one-down-spotify-signs-sony-to-us-deal/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20101216/d-dive-into-mobile-the-full-interview-video-of-spotifys-daniel-ek/ http://allthingsd.com/20101216/d-dive-into-mobile-the-full-interview-video-of-spotifys-daniel-ek/#comments Thu, 16 Dec 2010 17:05:59 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=38664 As promised, All Things Digital will be publishing the full videos of the interviews we did last week at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference in San Francisco.

The first extension of the event, it produced some very newsy sessions. We’ll be posting them all this week and next.

And today, here’s Spotify’s Daniel Ek (pictured here) singing for his supper.

Well, not in the U.S. as yet, where the Swedish CEO and co-founder of the innovative streaming music service has not been able to make good on his promise to strike deals with music labels, which fear the popularity of Spotify could cut back on sales of CDs and digital downloads.

In Europe, the popular service offers unlimited tracks for free, or users can subscribe for an advertising-free version.

Ek talks about all this and more in his interview with MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka.

Here’s the video:

Next up: Flipboard’s Mike McCue (who just joined the Twitter board).

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101216/d-dive-into-mobile-the-full-interview-video-of-spotifys-daniel-ek/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101215/d-dive-into-mobile-the-full-interview-video-of-foursquares-dennis-crowley/ http://allthingsd.com/20101215/d-dive-into-mobile-the-full-interview-video-of-foursquares-dennis-crowley/#comments Wed, 15 Dec 2010 17:05:57 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=38555 As promised, All Things Digital will be publishing the full videos of the interviews we did last week at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference in San Francisco.

The first extension of the event, it produced some very newsy sessions. We’ll be posting them all this week and next.

Today, we check in–ha, ha, get it?–with Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley (pictured here).

The co-founder and CEO of the popular social geolocation service was actually quite up-front about a wide range of topics, from acquisition interest to Foursquare’s recent funding to an analysis of the increasing competition for the innovative mobile service.

Crowley also talked a lot about where Foursquare is heading as a business.

And he took it well when BoomTown compared his hairdo to Justin Bieber’s.

Here’s the video:

Next up: Spotify’s Daniel Ek!

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101215/d-dive-into-mobile-the-full-interview-video-of-foursquares-dennis-crowley/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101207/spotifys-daniel-ek-explains-why-the-music-business-needs-him-and-you-do-too-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20101207/spotifys-daniel-ek-explains-why-the-music-business-needs-him-and-you-do-too-video/#comments Wed, 08 Dec 2010 00:10:20 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=26720 Spotify CEO Daniel Ek used to be confident that his buzzy music service would launch in the U.S. this year. That’s no longer the case, but Ek maintains that he’s going to get to the States sometime, and that people will love it when he does.

Here’s the thing, though: In Europe, where Ek has more than 10 million users, and 750,000 paying subscribers, music subscription services are a novel idea. In the U.S., they’re old hat: Ask Rhapsody. And Napster. And Rdio. And MOG. And Thumbplay, etc.

And subscription services haven’t really taken off, either: Most music listeners seem content to buy their music from Apple’s iTunes, or even brick-and-mortar stores like Best Buy and Wal-Mart. Or they don’t pay for music at all.

So what’s going to make Ek and Spotify stand out? We’ll let him make his case, in his own words, in a highlight reel of the conversation I had with him onstage at D: Dive Into Mobile.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101207/spotifys-daniel-ek-explains-why-the-music-business-needs-him-and-you-do-too-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101207/spotify-ceo-daniel-ek-at-dive-into-mobile/ http://allthingsd.com/20101207/spotify-ceo-daniel-ek-at-dive-into-mobile/#comments Tue, 07 Dec 2010 17:12:05 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=208

Spotify’s Daniel Ek, who heads up the most talked about streaming music service in Europe, continues to promise a U.S. launch this year.

But the company has been unable to strike deals with U.S. music labels, which fear popularity of the service could cut back on sales of CDs and digital downloads. In Europe, the popular service offers unlimited tracks for free, or users can subscribe for an ad-free version.

With three weeks left in the year, will the Swedish entrepreneur keep his promise? Stay tuned as Ek takes the stage with MediaMemo’s own Peter Kafka at D: Dive Into Mobile.

10:06 am: Peter takes the stage to welcome Daniel Ek.

10:08 am: Peter: Spotify is the most awesome music service that you can’t get in the U.S. It’s Dec. 7; can you get it in the U.S.?

Daniel: No, you can’t. There are more complexities. We have to do deals with music labels, etc. It’s hard, he says. “It’s a business problem and a product problem at the same time.”

10:09 am: Daniel is still eluding the question.

10:09 am: We are definitely going to do the U.S., you’ll see. I’m here today.

Peter: You can’t commit to launching in the U.S.?

Daniel: I can’t commit to a specific date.

10:10 am: With no news on a launch date, Peter asks Daniel how it works.

Daniel: You download it to your PC, and it’s also supported on a host of mobile phones. The general idea is that you can access music for free, with adverts, or if you pay, you can take it with you. The limit is 20 hours of music a month.

10:11 am: Daniel: There’s not that many ads; the fee is 10 euros. It will be $10 in the U.S. (Whenever it comes, I suppose.)

10:11 am: Peter: This sounds like a lot of products–Rhapsody, Napster, Thumbplay, etc. What’s different?

Daniel: The concept isn’t different, but more people now are consuming more music than ever. You aren’t just a punk rocker, but you may also be listening to old-school blues, etc. Music has to adapt to a consumption model.

10:13 am: Peter: Do we no longer value music because of Napster 10 years ago?

Daniel: Yes, that’s part of it, but people also want to have access to everything on every device. In the past year, we’ve seen the adoption of smartphones. Pandora has been very successful because of smartphones. People are consuming a lot more of it.

10:14 am: Peter: It’s all free, so this is a problem for the producers who aren’t getting money from anyone.

Daniel: That’s a problem, but we’ll figure out ways to provide value that people are willing to pay for.

Peter: How many subscribers do you have in Europe?

Daniel: 750,000 paying customers, who pay about 10 euros a month.

Peter: Okay, that’s up from half-a-million earlier this year.

10:15 am: Daniel: What’s unique about Spotify and why we are growing so fast…

How fast? Peter asks.

Daniel: We launched on mobile in September 2009, so it’s been about a year.

The value is convenience and accessibility and packaging it in a good way (i.e., some of the stickiness comes from users creating lists and building their libraries).

10:17 am: Daniel: Another thing helping our growth is social networks, he says. They have a huge impact on people sharing content. It’s getting to become the primary way of how I find out what’s going on.

10:18 am:( It’s demo time! For all of those who have special access, or have hacked it, you know what this looks like already.)

10:18 am: Daniel is showing off his playlists, some of which come from Spotify and some from tracks he already owns. He’s showing this offline (because he doesn’t want to incur roaming fees), so he can’t demonstrate how you’d search for new music.

10:20 am: Peter: Are people comfortable with renting songs now, and listening to music in the cloud?

Daniel: This is something the industry needs to work on to make it 100 percent reliable, but it lets people have access anywhere.

10:21 am: Daniel says he wants to provide music to users “super fast.” But he sure is dragging his feet when it comes to providing it to U.S. consumers…ho hum….

10:22 am: Peter: People are still buying CDs.

Daniel: People are always asking me why. Is it because they want to own it? I don’t think so.

10:23 am: Daniel: Everyone expects things for free on the Web, but Apple is showing that people are willing to pay for apps.

10:24 am: Peter: I hear about how Apple might be working behind the scenes, telling music labels not to work with Spotify. Have you heard that?

Daniel: I read the news, so I’ve heard about it. I don’t actually try to focus on what Apple is doing, or what others are doing. I am, first and foremost, a user.

10:26 am: Daniel: China has 400 million Internet users, and one of the top things they do on the Internet is music. For me, it strikes me as odd, the value of the entire music business is $15 billion.

Peter: It used to be $40 billion. What’s the holdup with the labels?

Daniel: It just takes time. There are a bunch of companies that say they want to do it this year. But at the end of the day, you can only do so much that’s in your control. We believe in our model.

Peter: Which is to give music away for free. Would you change your model here?

Daniel: We would not just launch a subscription service here. Right now you can pretty much access any music for free. YouTube is one of the biggest sources in the world.

10:30 am: Peter: Are you raising money now in order to pay more to get the music deals done?

Daniel: No, but I wouldn’t rule it out in the future, though.

10:31 am: What’s it like to work with Sean Parker, who was from Napster and Facebook.

Daniel: I just saw “The Social Network.” I’m not sure if it’s true, but I really liked it. Sean wrote me this really long email about all the flaws in Spotify. He’s so great at product, so for me, this is someone who has been thinking about the product since the beginning of Napster.

10:32 am: Peter: Any audience questions? Jokingly, he asks, “How about from Rob Glaser (former CEO of RealNetworks)?”

10:33 am: Next question from Glaser! He asks about the music label deals he signed in Europe.

Daniel: It’s a really interesting time. If this is going to be the next big thing, that’s why they are taking their time. Is it going to be a la carte, or subscription?

10:35 am: Peter: Google has been talking about music, and Facebook is thinking about it. Would you link up?

Daniel: We are a developer on both Facebook and Android.

Peter: I mean deep core integration.

Daniel: We would never do any exclusive deals. We want to get music to become like water. We think it’s the most social object in the world. If music could flow freely on the Web, it would surpass the popularity of photos. People are paying by looking at ads, buying tracks or subscribing.

10:37 am: Last question from the audience, about Nokia-bundled music with smartphones through a service called Comes With Music. “Do you think those kinds of integrations can work?”

Daniel: I do. Our whole strategy is around the platform. I don’t know how well the integration worked with the phones, but it wasn’t playing nicely with the Web, or with the iPhone. Like the Kindle. It works on the Kindle, but you can also read books on the iPad. Whether people pay for the device and it’s bundled in, or whether it’s part of a TV package, it doesn’t matter.

10:39 am: That’s it folks–thanks for tuning in!

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101207/spotify-ceo-daniel-ek-at-dive-into-mobile/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101207/spotifys-daniel-ek-well-launch-in-the-us-just-not-sure-when/ http://allthingsd.com/20101207/spotifys-daniel-ek-well-launch-in-the-us-just-not-sure-when/#comments Tue, 07 Dec 2010 17:11:53 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=263 Spotify, the U.K.-based music-streaming site will eventually launch the service in the U.S., its CEO Daniel Ek said in an interview at D:Dive Into Mobile, but he wouldn’t commit to a specific date. That’s a step back from a previous promise to launch the service in the U.S. in 2010.

Asked specifically about a prior commitment to launch Spotify in the U.S. before the end of the year, Ek blamed the complexities of working with U.S. recording labels. “It’s a business problem and a product problem at the same time.”

He said he remains hopeful about launching in the U.S. “We are definitely going to do the U.S., you’ll see. I’m here today….I can’t commit to a specific date.”

Ek said Spotify has about 750,000 customers in Europe who pay an average of 10 euros per month.

Asked if Spotify is raising money in order to perhaps put more on the table in negotiations with music labels, Ek said the company is not raising money right now. “But we won’t rule it out.”

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