Daniel Ek has devoted most of his waking moments over the past few years to evangelizing about the glories of streaming music. He’s well suited to the task. In addition to a forbiddingly deep reservoir of knowledge about every genre and subgenre to emerge from his native Sweden, Ek, 31, is the co-founder and chief executive of Spotify, the first company to make streaming so easy that downloads quake in its presence.
Spotify, the Swedish music streaming service, has seen a surge in the number of paying subscribers and active users over the last year. Today Spotify revealed it had signed up 10 million paying customers for its Spotify Premium service, and now has more than 40 million active users across the globe. The new data showed a 66% increase in both paying customers and active users overall. The last time Spotify shared data it had 6 million premium customers and 24 million active users. Two weeks ago the music business was thrown into a frenzy after news hit that Apple was buying Beats By Dr. Dre for $3.2 billion. Beats makes both popular headphones and offers a music streaming service similar to Spotify’s. It’s still unclear whether Apple bought Beats for its headphones or its music platform, but most people I’ve spoken with say it was a hardware play–after all, Apple’s iTunes music store already has the most lucrative music licencing deal in the industry.
