{"id":741402,"date":"2013-03-12T11:13:20","date_gmt":"2013-03-12T15:13:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paidcontent.org\/?p=225823"},"modified":"2013-03-12T11:13:20","modified_gmt":"2013-03-12T15:13:20","slug":"spotify-hits-6-million-paid-users-as-market-for-music-streaming-heats-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/741402","title":{"rendered":"Spotify hits 6 million paid users as market for music streaming heats up"},"content":{"rendered":"

Music subscriptions services, which provide an alternative to purchasing songs on sites like iTunes, continue to gain in popularity. One example is Sweden-based Spotify, which is expanding rapidly across the globe and has now added another 1 million paid subscribers in the last three months.<\/p>

According to figures reported by CNET<\/a> and confirmed by Spotify, the company now has 24 million active users and 6 million paying subscribers across the world. Spotify is also growing rapidly in the United States, where it arrived in July 0f 2011<\/a> and is this week hosting musicians <\/a>at its “Spotify House” at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas.<\/p>

Despite the hype, the underlying economics of Spotify’s business model remain uncertain. The service is beholden to musicians and studios,\u00a0which request a 70 percent cut, and it must contend with a growing list of competitors that include Pandora, Rdio<\/a> and SoundCloud. Meanwhile, YouTube is expected to launch a subscription service<\/a> of its own in coming months and even Apple<\/a>\u00a0is expected to get into the streaming game too.<\/p>

This competition validates the underlying premise of Spotify — that people want access to a giant catalog of music instead of buying it piecemeal through iTunes — but the arrival of deep-pocketed rivals may hurt Spotify’s ability to compete in the longterm.<\/p>

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