More than a music service, Spotify aims to stamp out music piracy

Source: todayonline.com
Image source: Spotify

True to news reports last week, music streaming service Spotify has launched here today.
Singapore, together with Malaysia and Hong Kong, joins the 20 global territories in the Swedish company’s expansion.

Spotify is a music streaming service that lets users listen to their catalogue of more than 20 million songs for free on their desktop or laptop PCs. The free service will play between three and four advertisements every hour. A paid version of the service lets users take the music offline into their iPods, mobile phones and tablets with no advertisements. According to Head of New Markets for APAC, Spotify, Sriram Krishnan, paid and free users get access to the same catalogue of music.


Through its relationship with 300,000 music labels, the service ingests about 20,000 songs per day, adding about 7 million songs per year, added Mr Krishnan.

Users will have to pay S$9.90 per month for the Premium service.

Designed for active music fans and passive music listeners who may not know the latest artistes or bands, Spotify lets you search actively for artists and bands and, for the passive listener, recommends songs through its Radio service. You can also follow friends whom you share the same music tastes with, or artistes and celebrities who share their playlists on the Spotify app, explained Mr Krishnan.

As a member, you can build your own playlists and share them on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as friends on Spotify. Based on what you have listened to, the Radio feature will recommend songs that it thinks you might like.

When asked how Spotify will come up against France-based Deezer, which started operations here in September last year, Mr Krishnan said: “We don’t really focus too much on other music services because in the grand scheme of things, our biggest competition is piracy.

“The illegal music market is far larger than the legal music market. We win if a user that torrents music come to use Spotify. We’ll let the user decide who’s the best music streaming service.”

Mr Krishnan added: “At this point in time, we are the largest music streaming service, we’ve 24 million active users, 6 million paying users — that gives us a conversion of free-to-pay of more than 20 per cent, which is amazing.

“More than 20 million songs, relationships with 300,000 labels, we’re contributing US$1 billion dollars (S$1.2 billion) to the music industry come end of the year. Now we’re a force to be reckoned with. And we won’t stop until piracy’s stamped out.

“We take pride in knowing that as soon as we launch in the country, piracy has been reduced,” said Mr Krishnan.