Excerpt from an extensive Bloomberg BusinessWeek Spotify profile; I wonder if they’ll call their Facebook integration “Ping”…
Ek likes to say—often—that to succeed, any music service needs to be more convenient than piracy. Spotify is. You open an account. You download a program. And you can listen to any one of 15 million tracks, the result of two years of negotiations with the world’s music conglomerates that began, says Ek, rubbing the wisp and stubble that covers his head, back when he had hair.
Spotify is slick, intuitive, and fast; it can, for a verifiable fact, instantly serve Graceland to a phone resting in your shirt pocket on a highway in North Carolina at 1 a.m. In Europe, if you want to listen longer than 10 hours per month, avoid ads, or move offline with a music player, you pay a subscription fee that comes to about $15 a year. According to the company, 1.5 million Europeans already do. Although it serves only seven countries, Spotify is the second-biggest digital retailer in Europe after iTunes, according to the IFPI. On July 14, it arrives in America, and people familiar with both companies say a Spotify music sharing function on Facebook is in the works.
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