Broadband News
News, views and analysis
Spotify boss interviewed, stays schtum over PRS licence
30 Apr 2009 | 10.20 Europe/London
Paul Brown, Managing Director of the UK arm of Spotify, has given an interview to Media Guardian. As well as claiming that "a decent proportion" of subscribers have plumped for paying for their music streams, the company is looking at both mobile apps and rare content to boost their revenue. However, he remained coy when asked to reveal just how many people had signed up as paying customers.
Brown claims that Spotify has already got a million registered users. "The majority are obviously going to be free at this stage, and we have a nice proportion of paid subscribers," he says. When pressed on how a rate of around three ads per hour on the free service would make the company enough revenue, he as much as admitted it was a bit of a carrot for customers. "We're a new shiny thing, so we're probably going to have less audio ads per hour (at the start) but we've also got the visual advertising, and we've got some really interesting products for media buyers coming through.
When the sticky subjects of royalties came up, Brown got cagey again. "It's long and complex and there are too many lawyers involved. Spotify went and got its licences... it has healthy relationships with the rights owners and it's about growing your userbase until you're relevant because, until then, so what?"
Pressed on the subject of profitability, Brown claimed that Spotify was "on track to hit plan," and hinted that it was all about portability. "If you can execute well on the iPhone, for example, Spotify as a pay service might see a nice subset of that in the UK."
The plan is, it seems, to give the punters a combination of three things. "Hugely exciting content, platform development and consumer electronics devices that, if I'm getting that delivered to me well, I as a punter would probably pay for that."
You can read the full interview here.
Brown claims that Spotify has already got a million registered users. "The majority are obviously going to be free at this stage, and we have a nice proportion of paid subscribers," he says. When pressed on how a rate of around three ads per hour on the free service would make the company enough revenue, he as much as admitted it was a bit of a carrot for customers. "We're a new shiny thing, so we're probably going to have less audio ads per hour (at the start) but we've also got the visual advertising, and we've got some really interesting products for media buyers coming through.
When the sticky subjects of royalties came up, Brown got cagey again. "It's long and complex and there are too many lawyers involved. Spotify went and got its licences... it has healthy relationships with the rights owners and it's about growing your userbase until you're relevant because, until then, so what?"
Pressed on the subject of profitability, Brown claimed that Spotify was "on track to hit plan," and hinted that it was all about portability. "If you can execute well on the iPhone, for example, Spotify as a pay service might see a nice subset of that in the UK."
The plan is, it seems, to give the punters a combination of three things. "Hugely exciting content, platform development and consumer electronics devices that, if I'm getting that delivered to me well, I as a punter would probably pay for that."
You can read the full interview here.