The swedish music streaming company, Spotify, just released their financial results for 2009 which shows a loss of £16.66 million, around $26 million.
Sales, administration and distribution accounts for about £27.7 million but Spotify couldn’t get their revenue above £11.3 million for the year.
Music Ally estimates that Spotify had 7 million users across Europe by the end of 2009, up from the 1 million users they started 2009 with. Out of the 7 million, at least 250,000 users were paying subscribers and the rest were on free accounts.
Spotify would like to combine paid and free subscription models and make revenue come 40% from advertising and 60% from paid subscriptions.
While Spotify was supposed to have launched in the US earlier this year, speculations suggest that iTunes, among others, might be trying to keep them out of the country.
Personally, I’m quite satisfied with Spotify, though Spotify is not yet allowed in my country (Malta) so you have to “get creative” to sign up, but I’m a paying member and enjoying every moment of it. If you’re a Spotify user, you might want to consider upgrading to either their Unlimited package at £4.99 a month or their Premium package for £9.99. The alternative is that Spotify’s business model will not make it and we’re back to paying for each song we want to buy, rather than unlimited steaming for a fixed price per month…
Spotify is great.
Sadly they don’t have an affiliate program or I am sure they would grow a lot faster.
//Daniel
I agree. I have a spotify account and used to love it… a lot of the music I like is not to be found though which for me is a major niggle
I am a fan of music where the money went