Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek made an appearance in London last night at a Glasshouse event, to be quizzed on-stage about his company and its plans. He dished out some stats on how Spotify is doing, although not the all-important ‘how many of its users have upgraded to the premium version’ one.”We don’t give out exact numbers,” he said, according to TechCrunch. “It’s not double digits yet, but we think we can get there. We’ve always realised that the vast majority will be free users, but as long as that’s on a big scale, that’s OK. The numbers work.”However, Ek did say that in July, Spotify accounted for an impressive 35% of all digital music revenues in Sweden, and that it’s got one million users there out of a population of nine million.Ek suggested that this kind of scale will be the key to Spotify’s chances of success, predicting that in time, he hopes for 60% of the company’s revenues to come from subscriptions, versus 40% from advertising.”In any freemium model, if you’re getting double digits or higher, you’re doing well. We’ll get there. We’re already growing at 50% month-on-month, doubling our revenue every two months.”Ek also claimed that “80% of Spotify users say they have stopped filesharing”, to bolster his argument that Spotify should be viewed through the prism of its effect on piracy, rather than any cannibalisation of CD sales.And the future? Now that Spotify has its first two mobile apps live, the company appears to be shifting its development attention to other features of its service: “Making it easier for people to handle and share their music – particularly playlists. At the moment, there’s an ecosystem around Spotify, including sites like ShareMyPlaylists.com, but those sites are really just playlist aggregators. That’s not a concept we intend to replicate. We’re talking about real sharing and management tools.”
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