Spotify Hits 15 Million Subscribers

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Spotify has reached the 15 million subscriber level, and along with that what the company calls 60 million active users. Whatever the numbers mean, they are a signal that the online music firm has reached a point that could not have been expected a year ago.

The company describes itself and its service this way:

With Spotify, it’s easy to find the right music for every moment — on your phone, your computer, your tablet and more.

There are millions of tracks on Spotify. So whether you’re working out, partying or relaxing, the right music is always at your fingertips. Choose what you want to listen to, or let Spotify surprise you.

You can also browse through the music collections of friends, artists and celebrities, or create a radio station and just sit back.

Spotify’s primary competition includes several large companies, and ones that have powerful subscriber bases, ways to build them and years drawing online media consumers. These include the Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iTunes Radio, Google Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) All Music Play Access, Pandora Media Inc. (NYSE: P) and Amazon.com Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) Music First.

Business Insider recently lauded the Amazon service:

Amazon Music lets you search through a catalogue of over 1 million songs in addition to a collection of curated playlists. You can stream songs on-demand over Wi-Fi or your data plan, and just like Spotify, you can also download tracks directly to your device for offline playback.

While Amazon, Apple and Google can afford for their services to fail, because of their balance sheets and the fact that music streaming is not their primary business, Spotify cannot. Spotify, therefore, operates without a safety net. That means, even if it has 15 million subscribers and a service that may be superior to the competition, it has a more perilous future than almost all the others in the space.

The best product does not always win.

ALSO READ: The Bullish and Bearish Case for Walt Disney in 2015

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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