by Ben Sisario – via New York Times
Spotify arrived in the United States a year ago this month, and to note the occasion it sent subscribers an infographic with some intriguing numbers. But the most important figures are the ones it doesn’t release.
In the mailing, sent late last week, the company said its American users listened to “over 13 billion songs” in the year. They also shared 27.8 million tracks through social media — 55.3 percent of them through Facebook, 41.5 percent on Spotify’s own system, and 2.7 percent via Twitter.
It has been a big year for Spotify, which lets people stream millions of songs free, with ads, or pay $5 to $10 a month to listen without ads. The company struck partnerships with Facebook and Coca-Cola, spiced up its once-plain home page with dozens of third-party apps, and is reportedly in the process of raising $220 million in investment at a whopping $4 billion valuation.
But for people in the music business, Spotify has been frustratingly slow to release data on its users and its complex royalty system, and the opacity of the system has raised perennial worries among artists that they are not getting their share.
Read full story at New York Times – Media Decoder
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