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Digital
Spotify man still eyeing 2010 launch in US
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 19 July 2010
Spotify top man Daniel Ek has told the Daily Telegraph his company is still on track for launching its streaming music service in the US this year, adding that he is in constant talks with key people in the American market about the launch.
As previously reported, it’s thought that US labels are not keen on signing up to the free version of Spotify, concerned it will kill existing subscription-based streaming and download services in the States. An increasing number of people reckon Spotify will eventually launch Stateside without a free version, but either way, wrangling over licences is seemingly delaying the firm’s arrival in North America.
Speaking to the broadsheet, Ek added that his music service is growing “healthily”, and that continued growth is important for his company to ultimately succeed. Success, he seemed to be saying, also required a US launch. He told the paper: “Is it [Spotify] a perfect system? No. Does it work? No, not yet. It works when you reach enough of a scale. Hence, one of the most important things Spotify can do is to grow. It’s not really about how many paying users have we got versus free users, it’s about how big we can grow the entire system”.
In sort of related news (well, in other digital music news that doesn’t deserve its own story), HMV is expected to take its new look download service out of beta by the end of this month, while MySpace is reportedly implementing new page templates which artists will be able to use for their profiles on the sort-of social networking site, which will reportedly make said profiles look much slicker. Good times.
