Music Ally

On Saturday, MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta revealed that more than 180 million playlists have been created on MySpace Music. Well, Spotify is hot on its heels: yesterday, its CEO Daniel Ek revealed its own playlist stats, based on just six countries in Europe.

“Right now we’re almost close to 100 million playlists on our users, and 30% of those are albums,” he said. “People do actually listen to albums, and they’re storing them.”

Ek also said that Spotify doesn’t differentiate between its ad-supported and subscription business models – they’re wrapped up together, along with revenue from downloads.

He also claimed that it’s not just mobile apps driving Spotify’s customers to upgrade to the premium version:the playlists are important too. “More and more of our users are understanding and building their library in Spotify. Once they invest in that, the willingness to pay increases.”

Ek also alluded to Spotify’s current investment in more social features for its service, but warned that this won’t represent a complete about-turn in the company’s strategy.

“We’re looking at that quite a lot, but we’re not Pandora or Last.fm,” said Ek. “I think they’re fantastic products, but what we’re trying to do… we’re really trying to drive you to create your library and to use Spotify as the cloud-based service where you have your music library.”

Interestingly, though, Facebook and Twitter are currently Spotify’s two biggest traffic sources, according to Ek – showing the importance of user playlists and recommendations to the service.

Overall, he was positive. “This is the first time in history when technology and the music landscape are somewhat aligned, and that’s the key to Spotify having more than 250,000 [paying] subs.”

He also promised that Spotify is looking at how to improve its integrated downloads offering, including allowing people to buy playlists rather than just individual songs.

“There are tons of things that we can do to drive commerce, to package content better,” he said. “I think you’ll see us adding a lot more of those kinds of features, and trying a lot more things around that.”

Spotify shared the stage with YouTube’s Patrick Walker yesterday – click here for what Walker had to say, or read our full liveblog on the Midem(Net) Blog.

Tags: daniel ek, MIDEM, midemnet, spotify

This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 8:04 am and is filed under Digital Music News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.