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MUSIC

Spotify stake bought by Nordic mobile giant

Nordic telecom operator TeliaSonera has bought a 1.4 percent stake in music streamer Spotify, valuing the online music service at more than $8.2 billion.

Published: 10 June 2015 13:44 CEST
Spotify stake bought by Nordic mobile giant
Spotify's Stockholm office. Photo: TT

“TeliaSonera is investing $115 million for a 1.4 percent stake in Spotify,” TeliaSonera said in a statement.

The Wall Street Journal quoted a source close to the matter as saying that the investment was part of a $526-million fundraising round, allowing the company to top $1.0 billion collected since its creation in 2008.

The New York-based daily identified the investors as American, British and Canadian funds, including one controlled by US investment bank Goldman Sachs, and Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund.

Among the investors, TeliaSonera is the first to reveal publicly the size of its stake in Spotify, a pioneer of online music streaming started by Swedes.

“Both companies are also committing resources, staff and other assets to ignite the joint innovation agenda within areas such as media distribution, customer insights, data analytics and advertising,” TeliaSonera added.

Since the Swedish state owns a small stake in TeliaSonera, this effectively means that the government now also has a slice of Sweden's most famous global firm to launch since Ikea and H&M.

READ ALSO: Spotify's new video streaming plan

The Luxembourg holding company Spotify Technologies registered turnover of €1.08 billion in 2014, but the company has not recorded a profit since its start.

Spotify has yet to comment on Apple's announcement earlier this week that it was launching a music streaming service expected to rival Spotify.

Spotify is currently available in 58 countries, while Apple Music will be launched at the end of June in over 100 countries for owners of Apple devices. By autumn, it will also be available for Android, the rival operating system by Google.

The Swedish company announced in May it would expand its services to include videos, podcasts and other content, some of which will be available exclusively on Spotify.

Spotify said on Wednesday it had 75 million users worldwide, of which 20 million are paying subscribers while the rest receive the advertising-financed free service.

CULTURE

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

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

Published: 17 November 2023 09:05 CET
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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