Spotify’s meteoric rise up the hype charts has brought with it some off-the-mark press reporting in recent weeks. Out of last week’s The Great Escape festival in Brighton, where CEO Daniel Ek joined two discussion panels, emerged down-page speculation that record labels recently made unannounced investments in the music streamer…

The Register: “The labels own 30 percent of Spotify through equity investments. It may be higher.” Telegraph.co.uk: “It is understood that a portion of these companies have taken equity stakes in Spotify, but Mr Ek declined to reveal the details of individual agreements.” Such an arrangement would begin to look like MySpace Music, which is an equity joint venture between the labels and Fox Interactive Media…

But Spotify tells us that’s “wrong” and “pure speculation” and denied Ek made such a statement. It’s not quite clear what’s wrong (whether labels have a stake, whether Ek said as much or whether 30 percent is the correct equity stake) and we weren’t at the event in question, but the company says its ownership position has not changed since paidContent:UK interviewed Ek in March, when he told us: “We have invested about €8 million of our own money so far, but we’ve also taken in venture capital from Northzone Ventures and Creandum. We don’t have any plans to raise money - I don’t expect us to be needing any money at all, actually.” Spotify said it’s just one example of speculation that has surfaced as the service’s notoriety has grown.

On industry-agreed online royalty rates, Spotify is likely incurring heavy per-track outgoings as its user base grows, though the service won’t reveal its recently-inked PRS For Music licencing arrangement. In theory, it could strike favourable deals with labels, on some sets of royalties, by offering them equity. But, unless such an agreement was in place in March that Ek didn’t allude to or there is one that the company hasn’t revealed to us today, there’s little to contradict Spotify’s rebuttal. According to the British-Swedish outfit’s last UK company filing in November, the only shareholder was Spotify itself.

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