The free music streaming service Spotify launched six months ago and has since racked up an incredible 1 million subscribers in the UK. Not bad for an island with a population of just over 60 million. The new UK managing director of the company, Paul Brown, recently spoke about the future of the service.

I first heard about Spotify in January and after a few days use gave it an almost unanimously positive review. Since then, I’ve recommended it to as many people as I possibly could, some of whom took the plunge and now love it as much as I do. So maybe I’m at least partly responsible (about 0.00001 percent) for the huge take-up rate Spotify has now announced – 1 million British subscribers in just a few short months.

How many of that 1 million actually pay for the service has not been revealed, but I’m thinking not many do. For those not aware of the service, Spotify is a free, ad-supported music streaming service which offers around 2.7 million tracks to listen to on demand. For those with deep pockets, there is a premium version sans adverts available for £9.99 ($15) a month.

Between October and February, Spotify was only available to new users via an invite. In February, that changed to a free-for-all, anyone-can-register deal, although this only applied to UK residents. Spotify is currently only available in the UK and parts of Europe, and is actually based in Sweden.

The UK seems to have embraced Spotify so wholeheartedly that the company is directing some resources to that market. Paul Brown, a former executive at both Pandora and Sony BMG, has recently been made the managing director for the UK. He recently spoke to PaidContent about how he sees Spotify now and where he sees it heading in the future.

He states that the premium model “isn’t just about no-ads,” and is “a platform that will grow with other things in it.” Despite claims that Spotify could kill iTunes and the like, Brown insists “there will always be physical,” adding “we’re not talking about the end of iTunes – we’re talking about a download model that will grow, physical will be with us, radio too; it’s a fragmented consumer base, not one size fits all.”

On the number of paid vs free subscribers, he says that “the majority are obviously going to be free at this stage, and we have a nice proportion – a decent proportion, but we can’t disclose numbers – of paid subscribers.” He then added that the company is “on a path to profitability.”

Spotify is a brilliant service that I’m just sorry isn’t yet available in more territories. It has features capable of changing the way we listen to music, and that has got to be seen as a good thing.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 9:13 pm under Internet, Media players, Music, Opinion, Technology.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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