At the Digital Music Forum East in New York today, Thomas Hesse, President of Global Digital Bus., US Sales & Corp. Strategy at Sony (NYSE: SNE) Music Entertainment was the keynote interview, and he gave a lot of details on the company, state of the industry, and how he sees…

Spotify has reportedly raised further venture funding from Facebook and Friendster backer Founders Fund, for U.S. expansion. The company won’t comment on it when we asked. Former Stardoll CTO Daniel Ek and TradeDoubler co-founder Martin Lorentzon put up €8 million of their own money to start the music service in…

In a previous post I explained how free music services such as Spotify were making premium rental services such as Rhapsody and Napster increasingly irrelevant.  Why pay $9.99 for unlimited on demand streaming music when you can get it for free? It seems that Warner Music’s chief executive Edgar Bronfman…

Much-hyped music service Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek took to the stage at music-biz conference Midem and again tried to remind onlookers - it’s a mixed model of free and paid, not just free tunes on tap. That view of Spotify as a too-good-to-be-profitable, free-music Shangri-la has two roots - users…

Spotify has over 250,000 paying subscribers, SVP Paul Brown confirmed on stage at Midem, as streaming services fall over themselves to downplay free in favour of premium. Pre-conference chatter had it that U.S. labels, in particular, are done with licensing any new sites that still insist on the former. This…

Music streaming service Spotify is still yet to launch in the U.S., but it already has big ambitions for revolutionising the market there. Buried in its annual report, in an interview with CEO Daniel Ek, the IFPI industry umbrella says: “In the U.S., Spotify’s goal is to increase the number…

Spotify‘s recent PR tightrope walk has paid off. We understand the streaming music app has now closed the funding round it was looking for. The startup is thought to have landed at least the £20 million or so it was seeking, making for what’s described as a “significant valuation”. The…

While Spotify crosses its fingers Apple will approve its client for iPhone’s App Store, some folk are already using Spotify on the handset. Spot, an unofficial counterpart that we discovered, has been available for jailbroken iPhones since May. Joachim Bengtsson, a student developer from Sweden (where else?), built the client…

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) had better hope former Tory shadow minister David Davis doesn’t return to a senior role in a future Conservative government. Its chief privacy counsel Peter Fleischer has given Davis a tongue-lashing for opposing Google Health and criticising Google’s privacy record. Davis was writing in The Sunday Times…

Orange UK says it will form a single mobile ad sales team with Blyk, which has now abandoned its ad-funded virtual mobile network (MVNO) model in favour of less burdensome carrier partnerships. “The MVNO had its own benefits but heavy lifting took time,” Blyk CEO Pekka Ala-Pietilä tells paidContent:UK. “If…

Streamed music service Spotify is trying to gain Apple’s acceptance for its iPhone app by simultaneously whetting users’ appetites and flattering the iTunes operator. It says it’s finished the app after conceptualising since February and “sent it over to the nice people at Apple”.

—We7: Is We7 finally hitting the right note? Two weeks after saying it’s getting two million monthly uniques, the site has leapfrogged Last.fm for UK’s top music destination based on visit share (Hitwise). Despite initially offering ads in free track downloads, We7 now has a mix of ad-supported streaming and…

Free and paid subscriptions are still growing, but not by enough to keep Financial Times profits in the same direction. FT Publishing’s January-to-June operating profit crashed 40 percent from last year to £14 million ($23 million), on 13 percent worse revenue of £176 million ($289 million). But at least it’s…

PRS For Music is stepping up its negotiating campaign against YouTube by wheeling out another host of artists and waving around a new licensing agreement it’s signed with Spotify. Last night, Wednesday morning, it held a press conference for the “media launch” of FairPlayForCreators.com, the campaign site that we’ve already…

Slicethepie commercial director and Pandora international MD Paul Brown is joining music streaming service Spotify as its first dedicated UK MD. Spotify last month announced 250,000 of its million users were in the UK and is now beginning to work with brands; the service is also available in Germany, France,…

Spotify is adding another commercial model to its ad-supported, £0.99-a-day, £9.99-a-month and download-to-buy options - brand partnerships around its playlists system. The on-demand music service this week did a campaign to facilitate playlists for The Boat That Rocked movie, another to host the soundtrack for WWF’s Earth Hour campaign and…

On-demand music streaming app Spotify has now formally added one of the three music retail affiliates it told us about earlier this month. Listeners can right-click track names and pick “Buy From 7Digital.com”, letting them purchase corresponding 320Kbps MP3s and some FLAC files from the six million track-strong service. Later,…

Since launching in private beta in October, music service app Spotify has attracted glowing reviews, a strong following and is emerging as perhaps the likeliest of the unlimited music access platforms to succeed. Now it just needs to attract enough advertising or paying subscribers to make a business. CEO and…

Spotify may have recently had to retroactively delete a bunch of tracks for which it did not have rights - but it’s now scored quite a coup by winning the right to showcase U2’s new No Line On The Horizon album in the UK and Spain. Online pre-release windows are…