Spotify Expands Its Reach, But Still Can’t Get to the U.S. [MediaMemo]
Another expansion for Spotify, the much-hyped European streaming music service: It’s now going to be available on Nokia (NOK) phones and other handsets that run the Symbian platform. That’s good, because the service is supposed to work best as a mobile play.
But Spotify has yet to make a key expansion: To the U.S., where the big music labels worry that consumers will love everything about the site except paying for it. That’s bad, since Spotify is supposed to work best as a subscription service.
Most Americans have never heard of Symbian, but it remains the biggest player in the global smartphone market (as long as you use a broad definition of smartphone). But it’s telling that Spotify first made a point of making its service compatible with Apple’s iPhone (AAPL) and Google’s Android (GOOG) handsets first.
In any event, Spotify is only available via mobile to paying subscribers, who shell out around $16 a month in the UK (and less in some other countries). They key question for the music business is how many of those there are.
Spotify won’t release any statistics, but one number that I’ve heard from people close to the company is 100,000, which works out to be less than 2 percent of the company’s overall user base (free users can only listen to the service on their PCs, and have to endure a small smattering of ads). But US music industry executives worry that the number may be even lower than that.
The two sides continue to chat, and conventional wisdom is that the service will indeed get to the US, one day. But at one point Spotify was talking about coming to America in 2009, and that looks just about impossible at this point. Now CEO Daniel EK is talking about the first half of 2010.
