Statements seen by the highly rated UK tech blog "The Register" indicate Spotify makes just 14p per user from its advertising-supported business.
The figures do confirm Spotify's explosive growth - topping half a million registered users in the UK in May from a standing start in January.
But revenues at this stage are negligible. Advertising income was just over £82,000 last month, hence the 14p figure. The takeup of the tenner-a-month subscription program is small, and as a percentage of users, is falling.
Fewer than 17,000 UK users were signed up to Spotify Premium in May.
It's early days for Spotify, and its potential is largely untapped. Spotify has yet to make its Premium service compelling; currently, it merely removes the already-unobtrusive advertisements. An offline version could be one way of luring subscribers - the mobile Spotify caches songs to be played offline, with iTunes-like easy synchronisation. An iPhone version is in the works, the company has confirmed.
8 comments:
Bring on the iphone version, i say - as long as it's fast on 3G I'll be happy (i doubt it will be somehow)
Today I've been listening to songs in Spotify with the new high bitrate (320 kbs ogg vorbis q9) and it was great. So there is another feature that will attract more premium users.
Overall though, it's still early days. Remember there will always be negative reports about succesful companies. It's part of the game. YouTube comes up as the perfect example of that.
Spotify is awesome, but I can't ever see myself paying a tenner a month for the pleasure.
free virtual festival using Spotify
www.invisiblefestival.org
I used to pay a tenner a month for Napster, which I thought was well worth paying at the time for a similar access to an extensive library of music on demand. Spotify has obviously superceded that and I only hope that they continue to find new revenue opportunities (check me with the marketing-speak!), instead of figuring that the ads just aren't annoying enough to make sufficient people cough up for the uninterrupted version.
Can we have a Spotify playlist thread? In fact, I may just start one...
I'm surprised Apple & Amazon haven't got into the space yet, as they already have a way to make this profitable with a click to purchase. It's probably because any high quality stream is so easy to copy & suspect Spotify will soon disappear for that reason.
Hoping NOT to see anymore Spotify playlists on these pages. Those that have appeared already here & on the Mothership are pretty annoying to those of us who don't have access. Quite liked last FM until their "upgrade" - now have pretty much given it up.
I'll not be doing that then, Shoey! I guess I'm in the first "honeymoon" period with it and still enjoying exchanging playlists etc, but I forgot that not everybody has access to it and I can imagine how annoying that would be when people are discussing lists you can't listen to. I'm finding it a little frustrating that so many of the things I'd like to share I only have on vinyl and can't upload to mp3 and put in the dropbox at the moment due to my current set-up, hence the desire to do spotify lists instead.
Thanks BB.
Perhaps we could tap Blimpy for some 'Spillharmonic money for a vinyl/digital converter or 2? I also have a vinyl collection that Shane might retrieve for me at some point. We owe it to our children to save some of this stuff, right?
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