Apple’s iTunes music juggernaut has been rumored to launch an all-you-can eat month subscription plan for years now. Apple, for whatever reason, has not made that move, and that left an opening for companies like Rdio and Spotify to enter the market, and it looks like Apple’s competitors have done well.
At today’s Global Business Summit on Creative Content in London, Spotify’s Chief Content Officer and Managing Director of Spotify North America, Ken Parks, announced that Spotify has over 15m active users, with 4m paying subscribers. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of these figures from around the world, but it’s probably fair to say that Spotify’s launch in the US last summer has had a significant part to play in this recent growth spurt. And it also represents a growth of 1m paying subscribers since January, when the company reported 3m paying members[…]
What surprises me the most is their comparatively high conversion rate from free to paid plans. While I doubt the ad-free experience is enough to convince almost one-third of their users to pony up some cash, being able to use Spotify on their mobile device probably is. Now that our portable music players (read as “phones”) are connected to the Internet at all times, a streaming service makes a lot of sense. Now we have to sit and wait to see if Spotify’s success can put enough of a dent into the iTunes ecosystem that Apple will react.
Source: TNW
