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Spotify hits million paying user milestone

Swedish music streaming service Spotify said Tuesday it had reached one million paying users, a number that has doubled in under a year but still represents fewer than one out of six Spotify users.

Published: 8 March 2011 17:07 CET

Spotify hits million paying user milestone

Spotify co-founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon

“The vast majority of subscribers (upgrade) after having first used the free service and the ratio of paying subscribers to active free users (is) now 15 percent,” Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek said in an email to AFP.

He called reaching one million paying users “an awesome milestone.”

The ratio shows that about 6.5 million people are active users — meaning they have connected at least once during the last 30 days — of Spotify’s free version.

“We think the figures, which make Spotify the most popular and fastest growing music subscription service of its kind in the world, show huge potential,” Ek added.

Founded in 2006, Spotify is one of the world’s largest streaming websites and is available only in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Britain, France, Spain and the Netherlands because of copyright issues.

The service had reached one million total users two years ago. In July 2010, it had about 500,000 paying users.

Spotify users can stream music for free from the service in exchange for listening to advertising, but can also pay five or €10 ($6.90 or $13.80) to gain ad-free access to the service.

The €10 version allows users to listen to their playlists whilst offline and to access their music through their mobile phones.

The Financial Times reported last month that the company was completing a $100 million funding round to which Russia’s DST Global participated.

Spotify refused to comment on that report.

They reported funding round valued the company, which is preparing to launch in the United States, at one billion dollars.

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New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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