CTIA Day Two Morning Keynote Part 4: Daniel Ek CEO of Spotify

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Our final keynote feature from the morning event is from speaker Daniel Ek, the Co-Founder and CEO of Spotify. As a refresher for those who don't know, Spotify is a cross-platform mobile and desktop music streaming app. It is similar to Pandora, but does a whole lot more, and is far more robust and versatile, especially the way it integrates with social networks like Facebook. Here are some facts and figures from his speech:

• In Europe, Spotify is the 2nd largest revenue stream for music labels.
• Last year, Spotify paid out $250 Million dollars to record labels during a slumping period in the industry.
• Users of the app/service listen to an average of 100 minutes of music per day on Spotify.
• Over 700 Million playlists have already been created on the service.

Mr. Ek expressed that, "We are not a music service, but a platform." This is because their product integrates across multiple different platforms and devices, and does much more than just stream music. He attributed the cause for the explosion of popularity of the Spotify service to the fact that they have integrated it with Facebook. He shares some more statistics to explain this further:

• There are over 1.5 Billion actions/shares of their service because of Facebook.
• Because of that, they have received over 50 Billion impressions from Facebook (users share their spotify music with friends on Facebook who then click to listen to the track)
• You can also launch other apps from within Spotify. Here are some notable examples: "TuneWiki", "SoundDrop", "Legacy" and "Classify."
• There are over 10 Million active users of Spotify. - He reiterated that those users are active, not just counted.

Mr. Ek elaborated that Spotify is both a platform and a social service. He also shared that one of their unique features is the ability to share your entire iTunes music library with your Android device, through the Spotify service. How many of you guys use Spotify and can attest to his claims?