GigaOM » Last.fm

Music site This Is My Jam could spin out from Echo Nest

Bobbie Johnson — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 13:00:40 +0000

Buzzy song-sharing site This Is My Jam could be going independent from its parent company as it prepares to take the next step in its evolution.

The site, which lets people share their favorite music track-by-track, has proven an underground hit online less than a year after launching publicly: more than 100,000 users have signed up, sharing over 900,000 songs. But the London-based service was started as a pet project inside music data company The Echo Nest — and it’s now exploring what happens next.

“Up until this point we’ve been incubated by The EchoNest, but now we’re looking at options for spinning out in our own right,” creator Matthew Ogle told me.

It’s been an unusual course for This Is My Jam so far — in fact, Ogle says that the site “wasn’t supposed to happen for a whole bunch of reasons”. Chief among them? The fact he’d decided to move out of the online music industry after leaving his role as head of web product at Last.fm back in 2010.

“Despite swearing off online music forever, in less than a year I’d been convinced by the awesome folks at The Echo Nest that we could do some cool stuff together,” he says. “They didn’t hire me to make Jam, they hired me in a dual role to be their man in Europe — evangelizing at hackdays, talking to developers — and also to be a kind of internal product skunkworks, prototyping stuff based on new APIs and using that to spark new direction that The Echo Nest could be going with their data.”

But when it turned out that Jam, an idea he’d been throwing for a while, had more going for it than the other skunkworks proposals, Ogle’s focus switched and the parent company funded development. Jam now has four full-time staff, as Ogle brought on former Last.fm refugee Hannah Donovan, and engineers Ralph Cowling and Andreas Jansson.

The failure of frictionless

The site is one of my favorite services to have launched in the last year or two, and it’s one I’ve found myself going back to more often than I expected. Posting your favorite tracks and browsing the tracks of others turns the site into a curious mixture of status update and radio station. It’s a great tool for telling people about the music you like — lots of people use it to showcase their mood, for example. But it’s also a treasure trove of music, allowing you to dig around in the tastes of others. Because it’s almost exclusively focused on what people are listening to now, it has a real-time quality to it… yet the conscious decision that goes into making your choice means that the end result is more personal than Pandora but way more curated than Spotify’s frictionless sharing.

In fact, says Ogle, the failure of frictionless sharing to provide anything more than a fleeting dip into a raging river of data left an interesting gap for Jam to fill.

“I couldn’t quite believe that in 2011 that social song sharing wasn’t just a solved problem,” he explains. “One thing that we talked about at last.fm a lot — you know that amazing moment in real life when someone grabs you and say ‘you have to hear this song, check it out’ and they put the headphones in your ears or put a record on. Anyone who cares about music even a little bit has had that moment.”

“We’re in this golden age of social media, we’re always connected to all of our friends at all times, and there’s big data around music — Spotify and Facebook have basically taken scrobbling to the mainstream — [so] there should be more ways than ever for me to go ‘I want to hear some new tunes, what are my friends listening to?’ and get good stuff… not just whatever they happened to accidentally listen to on Spotify. Conversely there was no way for me to share a song that people would still see five hours later. Everything was being forced in real-time.”

Curation/exploration

Donovan, who heads up the site’s design, points out that isn’t just vanity that drives — the performative aspect of social media where you are showing off your taste to others — but a sort of shared curation where users collaborate to uncover interesting tracks, point to classics or dig up forgotten material.

“This was actually really cool when we discovered this happening, because there’s no other music service on the internet where it’s OK to have old stuff mixed in too,” she says. “Either everything is organized around the music data thing — singles live inside albums that live inside artists — or it’s promotional in some respect, in which case they’re always pushing the latest album or the latest single that just came out.”

“On top of that I think there’s something around our culture today that’s driven by newness, and how things on the internet always have to be the latest and the newest. I heard somebody say when you’re curating something, you don’t necessarily want just the latest or the newest, you want to dig up old things that were really great and put them back in context alongside newer things, or mixed in with other stuff. That’s the job of the curator and that’s what makes it really enjoyable for the user or the observer.”

“We thought about curation a lot when we were starting Jam. The overall effect is that our users became the curators of this music, and we wound up with this lovely space where you could get Prince and Fleetwood Mac right next to the latest trendy pop band.”

That is, in turn, helping the product develop further forward. Coming very soon are some new additions to the site’s Explore pages, which will offer up some new ways for users to browse the site. Explore categories will include “Breaking” (songs that have been jammed for the first time recently, and subsequently shared), “Rare” (songs that have been jammed only once), and another one that lists just the first jams of newly-registered users. Although it could act as a way for users to introduce themselves to the service, the first jams could also become a sort of Greatest Hits package.

“A lot of people sign up and start with their favorite song of all time,” says Ogle.

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What the Last.fm founders did next: scrobble the web

David Meyer — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 11:00:58 +0000

Alongside the U.S.-centric Pandora, Last.fm was a pioneer in the web music-streaming space. Its core function, ‘scrobbling’, even threatened to become a widely-used word at one point. These days the company is trying to find its feet again, but co-founders Felix Miller and Martin Stiksel are onto a new project now, called Lumi.

Where Last.fm was all about recommending new music based on the user’s tastes (which were recorded through the aforementioned scrobbling), Lumi is trying to do the same thing for general web content. Only this time it’s even more of a sit-back experience: all the user needs to do is install a Chrome, Firefox or Safari browser plugin and let it watch pretty much everything he or she does online, barring the secure and private stuff.

“Ever since we left Last.fm, we were thinking about applying this concept and mix of technology on a much larger basis, to help people discover all sorts of content,” Stiksel told me. “How we are trying to do this is by allowing people to anonymously record their browsing data with Lumi to let Lumi know what things you are interested in. It’s the Last.fm concept applied to all sorts of web content.”

The service is very much in prototype phase right now, which is why Lumi is looking for early-birds to try using it over the next few weeks, to see what happens. As with all machine-learning systems, nothing valuable comes out until a good deal of data goes in. Lumi needs to see what people look at online.

Lumi co-founders Martin Stiksel and Felix Miller. Photo credit: Héloïse Faure

“This will take a little time; it’s going to be far from perfect at the start and might be a bit bumpy for quite some time,” a blog post from the pair reads. “But as more content gets introduced to Lumi, we’re sure Lumi will be able to find interesting and relevant stuff for you.”

How does it work? There, the two get tight-lipped, although Stiksel hinted to me that they were “using a bunch of technologies and seeing what works”. What they do stress is that it’s all about effortlessness – it doesn’t require you to rate content, like StumbleUpon does.

Privacy is naturally a concern so, as with other omniscient services such as Archify, Lumi is keen to tout its security credentials. “We assure you that your browsing activity is secure, completely anonymized, and only ever accessible by you,” the blog post reads.

It’s hard to tell how this will turn out. Indeed, I get the impression from Miller and Stiksel that even they aren’t fully sure where it’ll end up – that seems to be one point of this new testing phase. What I can say is that web content recommendation is threatening to become a hot market again, what with the advent of Lumi and Futureful, which we covered last month.

Give it a year or two. It seems a burning question down the line will be this: who’s better at recommending content, machines or your friends?

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Last.fm suspected password breach weeks ago

Bobbie Johnson — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 09:59:48 +0000

The security breach that led to millions of Last.fm passwords being compromised happened at least three months ago — and remained undetected, despite the fact that the company suspected in May that it had been targeted.

On Thursday, the CBS-owned, London-based music website became the latest website — after LinkedIn and eHarmony — to reveal that its data had been stolen, asking users to change their passwords after a dump of around 1.5 million passwords appeared on a cryptography forum.

Over the weekend, product chief Matthew Hawn posted an update saying that the hack had become apparent after a tip-off, and that the company had already upgraded its security as a result:

“Earlier this week, Last.fm received an email that let us know a text file containing cryptographic strings for passwords (known as “hashes”) that might be connected to Last.fm had been posted to a password cracking forum. We immediately checked the file against our user database and, while this review continues, we felt it was important enough to act on.

“We immediately implemented a number of key security changes around user data and we chose to be cautious and alert Last.fm users. We recommend that users change their password on Last.fm and on any other sites that use a similar password. All the updated passwords since yesterday afternoon have been secured with a more rigorous method for user data storage.”

But, while details of the attack only appears to have come to light in the last few days, evidence suggests that it actually happened at least three months ago — and that the company failed to catch it in the meantime.

In May, a number of users reported that they had been spammed at email addresses that could have only been available through Last.fm’s service. Customer support manager Matt Knapman responded by saying the company was investigating the incident and examining its systems for potential security breaches.

“We are investigating this matter urgently, running a security audit and looking at alternative ways the spamming of Last.fm users might have occurred.”

It appears this audit did not find evidence of the breach, nor did it uncover when the attack had taken place.

The timeline remains something of a mystery, but, despite rumors that it is the result of a breach that occurred in 2011, as suggested in this Reddit comment, I have learned that the attack most likely happened in February or March — a three full months before the first evidence spilled online.

The security flaw responsible, however, goes much, much further back. Former Last.fm developer Russ Garrett admitted on Twitter that he was responsible for failing to implement extra levels of password cryptography when he wrote the original security code as an 18-year-old in 2003, adding later that he “very much regretted” not fixing the issue before he left the company around three years ago:

@jgrahamc ultimately the unsalted MD5 auth was doing. In my defence: I was 18. It was 2003. The PHP community had no idea of bcrypt then.

— Russ Garrett (@russss) June 7, 2012

But even this is not the whole story: it explains why hackers were able to get crackable versions of user passwords, but not how they were able to access the data in the first place. How that happened, I am led to believe, is still being looked into.

I’ve contacted Last.fm for comment, but it is yet to reply.

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Now Last.fm looking into password hack. Who’s next?

Bobbie Johnson — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 08:16:04 +0000

First LinkedIn, then eHarmony, and now possibly Last.fm. As the number of sites falling victim to password hackers continues to grow, the questions are flooding in: are these incidents all connected? And, perhaps more importantly, who’s next?

On Thursday, the CBS-owned, London-headquartered music site told users that it was investigating a potential password leak — and that while evidence of what had been published and how it may have been obtained was not entirely clear, it wanted to take the precaution of getting users to change their details.

Here’s the announcement:

We are currently investigating the leak of some Last.fm user passwords. This follows recent password leaks on other sites, as well as information posted online. As a precautionary measure, we’re asking all our users to change their passwords immediately.
[...]
We’re sorry for the inconvenience around changing your password; Last.fm takes your privacy very seriously. We’ll be posting updates in our forums and via our Twitter account (@lastfm) as we get to the bottom of this.

The company has not made any other public statement, but it’s clearly extremely concerned about the possibility of passwords being leaked in the wake of the other breaches — which saw more than 14 million passwords from LinkedIn and eHarmony appear online.

Right now the extent of Last.fm’s breach is not clear, but warning all users to change their security details is not something that any web service takes lightly, given the potential damage to the site’s reputation.

All three incidents appear to be linked to a single web forum, frequented by cryptographers and fraudsters, where password hashes are often posted and decrypted. As Ars Technica reports, the LinkedIn and eHarmony breaches are linked to a hacker known only as “dwdm” — a Russian-speaking individual who has been dumping data on passwords for some time.

There appear to have been a series of dumps over recent days, although the posts have now been removed from the site in question and the original seem to have disappeared from Yandex Disk (the equivalent of Google Drive, where dwdm was storing data).

More to come, surely.

Photograph copyright Shutterstock / Tatiana Popova

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Monetizing music in the post-scarcity age

Mark Mulligan — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 06:55:26 +0000

On-demand streaming is only one part of a much broader transition taking place in the digital music industry: the shift from analog media business models to the age of digital consumption. This research note discusses that shift in light of the current music industry, where the iTunes digital download leads the market but will not necessarily lead the future. Simply put, the audio file alone is no longer the product. Instead, the experiences built around it are, and as we discuss here, services like Spotify, Facebook, Topspin and others are leading the way into this new era of dynamic, interactive and social music.

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Tape.tv, a Pandora for video, targets British launch

David Meyer — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 17:11:55 +0000

With news of its long-delayed German launch, it’s worth remembering that Spotify isn’t just a music player these days — it’s a platform. And one interesting app that appeared there on Tuesday was from Tape.tv, a service that aims to fill the gap left by the old MTV.

Tape.tv is essentially an online TV station with a few genre-specific sub-channels: think alternative, hip-hop and indie. They’re all filled with traditional music video content — there’s nothing user-generated here — but it does let the user like or dislike the videos they’re shown, which in turn allows the service to gradually customise what each viewer sees to their own tastes. In other words, it’s like Pandora for video.

The Berlin-based company has been going for around four years, collecting a catalogue of 45,000 videos and around 3.5 million users along the way, which is good work if you consider it’s only available in Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

So why just Germany?

I caught up with Tape.tv a couple of weeks ago and picked up three reasons why they haven’t expanded further yet. The first is language – it’s only in German now, of course – and the second is the need to work out licensing rights in each territory.

The third, though, is that Tape.tv wants to have an editorial team in each region. Sure, the YouTube age may have put editorial power in the hands of the user, but this team is taking an approach that’s something of a return to the curated experience of TV.

Which is where strategies like the intriguingly gamified Spotify app come in. The app doesn’t play videos inside the client (as you might expect) but instead presents a series of daily stories that let the user choose the ending. The chosen ending triggers one of two playlists, and for each track the user can choose to click through to watch the video on Tape.tv’s site.

It’s a novel use of the platform. But don’t be fooled by the cute idea: Tape.tv is a very serious company, with 85 employees, many of whom are in sales, and ambitious plans.

The site already does big ad deals around video premieres for the likes of Lady Gaga and Rihanna, and has branched out to real TV with a ‘social music program’ on the ZDFkultur channel.

And it wants to expand. Once those language, licensing and editorial issues have been ironed out, the company tells me, the UK will be the first country to get the service in non-German form — and expect that rollout to come within the next few months.

Licensing loopholes

It’s very interesting to see someone aim for the space that the old, pre-reality-dreck MTV created and abandoned, but there’s another interesting story hidden underneath the hood.

We’d love to know what arrangement Tape.tv has with GEMA, Germany’s notoriously hardboiled music rights collection society and the organization responsible for effectively breaking YouTube in the country. After all, the more interactive a music stream is, the more GEMA charges for it.

However, while Tape.tv does include some on-demand functionality, via search and mixtape creation, its main thrust is the sit-back-and-relax TV channel format. Tape.tv won’t go into the details of its GEMA arrangement, although CEO Conrad Fritzsch did hint to Der Spiegel last month that the site was “no classical on-demand portal”. This may suggest that the company gets away with paying GEMA less than it would if it were a fully YouTube-like interactive service.

We’ve already seen Berlin’s Wahwah.fm aim to recreate the linear radio-station model for smartphones as a strategy that is designed specifically to work around GEMA’s more onerous pricing levels.

Perhaps the collection society has inspired a trend away from interactivity. If it has, the users seem to like it.

Sometimes licensing moves in mysterious ways.

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10 ways big data changes everything

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 19:52:32 +0000

Industries like Internet search, genomics, climate research and business analytics are starting to create massive data sets — in the petabyte and exabyte range — that are requiring an entirely new set of big data tools to manage. The emergence of this so-called big data phenomenon is also fundamentally changing everything from the way companies operate to the way people interact to how the world deals with outbreaks of infectious diseases. On March 21 and 22, GigaOM is throwing an event about the future of this big data ecosystem in New York, and for the occasion, we have highlighted 10 case studies illustrating how big data is changing the world.

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5 music-focused iTunes alternatives for Mac

Alex Layne — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:57:56 +0000

iTunes has become more and more of a processor hog over the years as it has grown to handle more features. While it’s great for syncing your iOS devices or buying songs, it’s not exactly the most nimble music player anymore. Below are five alternatives that focus on the music, without the bloat.

Ecoute

Ecoute (French for “listen”) is aimed at being a minimalistic standalone player that syncs with iTunes. It’s been around the longest of the players listed here, having recently reached version 3.

The best way to describe how Ecoute looks is to imagine what the iPhone’s music app would like if it were ported to OS X. Navigation is done through lists, with album art on the left side to make it easier to distinguish between entries. There’s a breadcrumb navigation bar at the top, so it’s easy to get around.

Ecoute has a lot of nice touches. The Dock icon displays the currently playing album artwork, global keyboard shortcuts allow you to control playback in the background, and the controller (which can be customized with available themes) can display the current album artwork on the desktop. You can also share the current track on Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm.

Ecoute is available in the Mac App Store for $8.

Enqueue

Enqueue’s name comes from one of its main features: a queue in the sidebar that acts as a temporary playlist. You can drag songs and albums into the queue and listen to them in order, making it easier to plan and enjoy long listening sessions. Enqueue also has a mini player view available that just shows the queue alongside controls. Being able to see the queue makes it a lot more useful than iTunes’ mini player.

The rest of Enqueue’s interface is more traditional than the others in this list, but that doesn’t make it less useful. There are four tabs at the top for your library, playlists, history, and preferences. The library tab adopts a staid browser layout, with filter columns at the top and results below. I don’t much care for this configuration, so I was happy to see I could change it in the view menu to display just a list of artists on the left and results on the right.

The history tab displays your most played artists or songs and how they relate to each other using a bar graph, which is unique among the apps in this list. Further features include iTunes sync, Last.fm scrobbing, and configurable global shortcut keys.

Enqueue is available in the Mac App Store for $10.

Sonora

Sonora (Spanish for “sound”) has a straightforward interface with a lot of power buried beneath. The toolbar houses the controls for play, pause, shuffle and the like. The middle of the toolbar is occupied by the queue, an area where you can drag albums or songs from different artists to make a temporary playlist, similar to Enqueue’s. By default, the queue will be populated by songs from the currently playing album, which makes it easy to skip to a different song while browsing music as well. A sidebar along the left lists all artists, and the main browser shows album artwork arranged alphabetically by artist, like iTunes.

The most interesting feature of Sonora is the ability to type anywhere in the app to bring up a search box, which works a little like Alfred. Type the name of an album, hit enter, and it starts playing. It’s slick, but hard to discover initially.

Unlike the other apps listed, Sonora is still in beta, so be warned you might run into a bug or two. It’s available from the developer’s website for free for the time being.

Rdio

Rdio is unique among this group in that it streams music rather than playing downloaded files. This allows for a much broader selection of music, as anything in Rdio’s vast catalogue is available to stream. Instant access to new releases and recommendations is also a plus for Rdio. The downsides, of course, are the requirement of a network connection and the lack of more obscure artists.

The Rdio app itself is basically a wrapper around a web app, though most people wouldn’t notice. The load times are fast; I’ve never had to wait long for a song to buffer, and the UI loads quickly as well.

Rdio also has social features built-in. Other users can follow you and see what you’re listening to, and you can share your activity to Facebook, Last.fm, and Twitter.

Rdio is available for free, with a variable song cap (basically, the more you use the service, the lower the cap becomes). Unlimited desktop and web access is $5 a month, and unlimited web and mobile access costs $10/month.

Note: A competitor to Rdio, Spotify, is also quite popular. The reason I’m not covering it fully is because I think the Rdio app is better, though it still deserves a mention.

Vox

Vox is different from the other apps mentioned. Instead of choosing music from within the app, you choose it from the Finder. This behavior goes back to the early days of music players, when you chose music from the file manager instead of within the app itself.

The UI consists of several palettes rather than one unified window. The palettes can be hidden or shown with simple Cmd-number shortcuts, i.e. Cmd-1 to bring up the player, Cmd-2 to bring up the equalizer. The advantage of this kind of design is that it’s easy to show and hide what’s necessary. Of course, the downside is that it’s a little harder to use.

Vox has a large list of supported file types, including FLAC, OGG Vorbis, and Apple Lossless. There’s also an export feature, which can convert every file type it supports into a good selection of formats, including AAC and WAV. It can even apply effects to the exported version.

There’s also a menu bar entry for Vox, which lets you easily pause, skip, and choose a new song. Vox is available at the developer’s website for free.

Are you sticking to iTunes for listening to music, or have you switched to a different app to fulfill that need? Let us know about your favorite in the comments.

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Last.fm serenades users with new discovery tool

Bobbie Johnson — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 09:51:22 +0000

Last.fm is one of the grandaddies of online music services, but it’s surrounded by upstarts and rivals who keep launching new products and expanding.

To combat this, the site has just gone public with a new service of its own, last.fm/discover, aimed at helping users find independent artists and fresh music.

Music discovery tools aren’t new, but Last.fm’s betting that its huge trove of data — 40 million or so users, going back to the site’s inception nine years ago — can help uncover acts that might be unfamiliar to you. Specifically, it’s based around a library of some 2 million tracks mostly from independent artists, but also from some labels that have licensed their music for this purpose.

Unlike most other attempts at music discovery, which use the traditional iTunes-style lists or cover art, Discover uses a cute HTML5 interface to guide people through.

On loading the page, users are presented with a view of rolling hills stretching into the distance, each labelled with a tag related to a genre or sub-genre of music. Up close are the broader categories — “alternative”, “indie”, “electronic” and so on — while other less popular ones are visible in the background: like a sort of 3D word cloud.

As you click on tags and dig deeper, genres split into sub-genres, which split into incredibly specific meta-genres — fancy listening to some hiccup or kl4bb1n d0wn, anyone?

It’s all based on user data, yours and the rest of the site’s self-defined tags, and each tag represents a radio station: simply click to play a based on the tag you’re currently browsing. You can then ask for more of the same, shuffle off to something different or drag and drop tracks into a playlist for sharing.

This isn’t revolutionary, but it is fun. That makes a big difference in a market that relies, to some degree, on novelty. While I appreciate the utility of most music streaming services, the ones I tend to really enjoy are those that convey a sense of emotion or connection with music — services like The SixtyOne or Turntable.fm, for example. As Last.fm’s head of product, Matthew Hawn, told me, too often online music “ends up looking like a spreadsheet”.

That makes this an interesting move from Last.fm, which is really trying to gain back some ground and get back to its roots as a tool for helping music lovers get more out of their listening — not simply go toe-to-toe with Spotify, Pandora or the rest.

Earlier this year I met up with Hawn, who outlined in an interview how the site wanted to stay relevant: looks like this is the first real fruit of that labor, but I’m told there are more launches in the pipeline.

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Spotify Launching Integrated Apps Within Its Platform

David Kaplan — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 23:31:05 +0000

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek took the stage at Spotify’s first-ever press conference to expand the music streaming service’s Facebook integration to a wider world of social networks and devices, arguing that sharing is the only thing that can save the music industry and stop piracy.

Positioning it as the “next big step” for music, Spotify is opening up its platform to include apps from other companies, which will provide music reviews and news from the likes of Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, as well as internet radio from Last.fm.

Rolling Stone founder and publisher Jann Wenner went onstage next to herald the pop culture magazine’s integration into Spotify. Essentially, Rolling Stone’s app within Spotify will help provide recommendations as well as playlists.

(Rolling Stone and Pitchfork already have set up playlists, but it’s nothing more than what users can currently do themselves. Still, it was not immediately clear how this official Rolling Stone app would be more robust than what it currently offers.)

Earlier, Ek noted all the requests for features that Spotify gets, such as “DJ mode” for playing songs, lyrics to what’s being listened to, and accessing concert tickets and related info. Those features will now be supplied by app partners Last.fm, Tunewiki and Songkick, respectively.

One of the most polarizing things about Spotify’s integration with Facebook is the automatic sharing of what’s being listened to at a given moment. Users will now be able to segment out their “real” friends, whose musical tastes correspond more closely.

All the apps will be available to users of the basic, free Spotify version as well the paid subscribers.

So what’s the value to app developers and partners who appear on Spotify? Right now, it’s the promotional aspect of being able to reach Spotify’s 10 million active users.

“These are early days and we’re still trying to figure this out,” Ek said.

“Right now, there is no monetization model for the apps on Spotify’s platform [in terms of revenue sharing]. However, they can attract users, who want to buy concert tickets, as in the case of Songkick.”

Original post: After 20 minutes of serving truffled quail eggs, mini bagels with smoked salmon and other assorted amuse bouches, Ek took the stage at Spotify’s much-hyped New York press conference with a history of the CD in 1981. “Do you know what artist had the first CD? It was Abba, which like me, is from Sweden.”

He then went through Napster and iTunes. “Only 500 million are listening online. You need a better product than piracy. Fast and easy to share. it’s all about access. That’s why the CD is so ubiquitous: it works everywhere. Secondly, we want to ensure that artists get paid and continue to make great music.”

“We’re adding 20,000 new tracks a day and currently have 15 million songs — literally a lifetime worth of music,” Ek said. “We’ve become the second biggest revenue source for European record labels and have paid $150 million so far. Sweden was the land of music piracy. 33 percent of the Swedish population listens to Spotify — since that time, piracy has declined 25 percent.”

Since launching in the U.S. this fall, the company has 10 million active users, with 2.5 million paying subscribers. There have been 7 million users added since September, when it began linking up with Facebook as an app on the social network.

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