Spotify releases U.S. anniversary figures

Internationally popular music streaming outfit Spotify has released an infographic which illustrates some interesting statistics since last year's U.S. launch. The Swedish company is celebrating its first anniversary in America and by all accounts it looks like a success chock full of big numbers, impressive percentages and big bucks.

If you haven't taken a look at Spotify before, it's a $5/month all-you-can-eat streaming music buffet -- it's $10/month if you want mobile access. Users can listen in for free as well albeit with a few restrictions.

The service boasts over 18 million tracks and 20 million users world-wide, certainly making it one of the most popular -- and profitable -- destinations for streaming music. Spotify occupies the same turf as Rdio, Grooveshark and Mog.

According to the company's figures, its users have listened to more than 13 billion songs, accounting for more than 2,700 years or roughly 23.7 million man-hours worth of listening enjoyment. Spotify users have shared 27.8 million songs with friends while more than half (55.3 percent) of those users shared tracks through Facebook. The remaining majority (41.5 percent) were shared via Spotify itself while Twitter weighed in as the third largest sharing outlet around 3 percent.

Spotify introduced itself to the U.S. with some degree of exclusivity last summer, opening its doors as an invitation-only music streaming service to U.S. customers.  Toward the end of September however, Spotify opened its gates to all Americans with a free, 6-month, all-you-can-eat trial subscription. Much earlier this year, the Swedish company reported that it had net more than 3 million subscribers in 2011 with 20 percent of those users becoming premium members.

Spotify challenges Pandora with free radio on iPhone, iPad

Music streaming service Spotify has announced it is adding a free radio feature to its iOS appthat will compete with the likes of Pandora, Slacker and Songza. Previously only available to desktop users, the feature will enable both free and premium Spotify users to create unlimited radio stations based on specific artists, songs, playlists or albums and stream them from an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.

Those under the $9.99 a month plan won’t hear any commercials and will be able to skip as many songs as they like, while free users will hear two to three minutes of commercials each hour and can skip about six songs every 60 minutes. Also, although Spotify Radio will be available for free and premium users in the US, it will be limited to premium subscribers only in the remaining fourteen markets Spotify supports.

The company is betting that free, ad-supported radio will attract users who can turn into paying subscribers later. The model is also cheaper to operate because it doesn’t require agreements with record companies — which Spotify has for its on demand service — thus royalty rates are lower and set by Congress.

Spotify has about 3 million paying subscribers globally and 10 million registered users worldwide as of November 2011.  Pandora, which was founded in 2005 and has yet to expand outside of the US, has 150 million registered users with 49 million listening within the last 30 days.