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Spotify's paid subscriber count soars to 10 million

Spotify's paid subscriber count soars to 10 million

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Spotify's paying subscriber count has soared over the last year, rising up to 10 million today from 6 million in March of 2013. Its active user count has seen almost identical growth, now reaching over 40 million, up from 24 million last March. In that time, Spotify has made some key product changes, including app updates and additions to its free service, but the most critical change may be that it's gone through a huge expansion, more than doubling the number of markets it's in and moving into South and Central America in a big way.

"We’re widening our lead in the digital music space."But for all its subscribers, it seems that Spotify is not yet profitable. Financial Times reports as much, and that absence of profits may well be reflective of Spotify's wide gap between paying and non-paying subscribers. While a subscriber paying around $10 per month is typically profitable for a music streaming service, ad-supported listeners are usually far less so. And in expanding, Spotify hasn't been able to change the ratio of paying to non-paying listeners. So while it has the reach to potentially bring in big numbers down the road, it may need to start seeing more conversions for that to happen.

Still, those numbers signal that Spotify's aggressive expansion has allowed it to stay far ahead of its competitors. "We’re widening our lead in the digital music space and will continue to focus on getting everyone in the world to listen to more music," Spotify CEO Daniel Ek says in a statement.

To celebrate its growth, Spotify also detailed a few fun statistics on what people are listening to. Somehow, Eminem is its most streamed artist of all time, with Rihanna coming in first place among female artists. David Guetta and Katy Perry take second place for most-listened-to male and female artists, and Avicii takes the title for most streamed song with "Wake Me Up," which has seen a staggering 235 million listens.

Based on most recently given figures from services that detail subscriber count. Beats' figure from leaked report.