No big announcement at Spotify's SXSWi talk
Spotify currently has about 7 million users, around 320,000 of whom pay for a subscription to opt out of audio and display ads, despite being technically restricted to six European countries. But eager to try out the service, many in the U.S. and elsewhere have capitalized on sneaky workarounds and Internet proxies to get Spotify for themselves. Ek presented a live demo of Spotify's desktop software and Android app to the audience, ostensibly novelties because the service isn't available in the U.S. Interviewer Eliot von Buskirk, a music journalist for Wired magazine, had polled the audience to see who had tried Spotify, and when a surprising number of hands went up, von Buskirk joked, "So everybody's from Europe?"Crowds had turned out for the keynote because Spotify is one of those rare music services that actually might have potential--its attractive design, focus on playlist creation and sharing via URLs, and simple interface have won it many fans. Some might say that Ek, a 26-year-old from Sweden, is naive because he still believes that there's money to be made in digital music--a model that's time and again proven to be a cash drain and an investor disappointment for just about anyone not affiliated with Apple. He said over and over that the music industry needs to embrace multiple revenue streams, truly believing that it's the only way that the money will come in."There isn't one business model that will save the music industry, but it's about figuring out how to use downloads, how to use subscriptions, how to use merchandising, ticketing, and all these things," he said.Ek did hint that one of Spotify's big plans right now is to get its product on other platforms. "Most of the other (non-iPhone) handset manufacturers lack a really good media player, and we've seen that people tend to use Spotify as a media player on Nokia handsets, on Android handsets, and so on," he said. "It's been very cumbersome to get your music on a BlackBerry phone or a Nokia phone from your iTunes library, and that's something we want to sort out."It's beyond mobile, too."We want to enable your library on all these devices, whether it's a set-top box, an Xbox, a mobile phone," he said. "We want to make music like water."
