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 can’t stop talking about its awesomeness, and some U.S. onlookers (yet to try it for themselves) are mischaracterising it.
So let’s change the record (and hope this is our last Spotify post for at least a day) – a different area highlighted in his Midem Q&A offered an additional insight in to how Ek wants Spotify to profit from being the fabric of users’ music experience. In short: it’s the library, stupid…
“What you’ve got to realise – we’re really trying to drive you to create your library and use Spotify as the cloud-based service where you have your library. We’re seeing the early days of a platform.
“For us, the most important thing is to drive the engagement in building the library. When you want to drive that library to your mobile phone or Xbox or Sonos, you’re paying for that access.”