Haley's Spotify numbers

[Miguel]

Spotify is a subscription-based music streaming service (app) with over 75 million users that launched in 2008.

In this case, "spins" ="streams"

2012:

Billboard will begin to publish a new chart — On-Demand Songs — that ranks singles according to the number of times they were listened to on those six Internet services — Spotify, Rhapsody, MOG, Slacker, Muve Music and Rdio.

That data will then be folded into the Hot 100 chart, along with tallies of streams from sites like Yahoo, Myspace, Guvera and Akoo. The chart’s new methodology, first reported in The Wall Street Journal, still gives the greatest weight to sales, followed by radio play, and then online streaming.

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November 2013:

How Spotify Made Lorde A Pop Superstar

Before New Zealand pop-star Lorde was on every radio station in the U.S. and topping the Billboard Hot 100 list, she was featured on Sean Parker’s Spotify playlist–Hipster International.

The Napster co-founder, former Facebook president, billionaire and early Spotify backer also runs one of the most influential playlists on the Spotify platform with 814,000 subscribers.

“I feel like in many ways she’s the antidote to disposable pop music,” Parker tells me. “I feel like it was accessible to the same people who listen to Katy Perry, for instance, but there’s obviously something more authentic and personal to Lorde’s music. I got the sense she represents the return to a singer-songwriter approach to songwriting, and yet she has a knack for writing incredibly infectious melodies.”

On April 2nd, Parker added Lorde’s single “Royals” to Hipster International, a move that would help propel the then unknown sixteen-year-old to international stardom. “The moment Lorde’s “Royals” was added to Sean Parker’s popular Hipster International playlist on Spotify, we saw an immediate reaction around the world,” Jason Flom, the head of Lava Records, who signed Lorde this spring, said in an email. “Six days later, “Royals” debuted on the Spotify Viral Chart. The plays just kept growing as word of the track spread across their network…It was the first spark that lit the blaze of attention and activity that culminated in Lorde’s incredible album debut.”

Lorde continued to jump on Spotify’s Viral Chart, cozying up with superstars like Katy Perry, Drake and Lady Gaga. Steve Savoca, the head of content at Spotify, took notice quickly. “It translated into this social phenomenon,” says Savoca, who previously worked in digital marketing and business development for music labels like Sony and Warner. “The users felt they discovered something really exciting and they wanted to express it. They shared the track with friends on Spotify, Facebook and Twitter… it spread like wildfire.”

Savoca and his Spotify team began promoting Lorde throughout the platform and featured her on the Spotify homepage. By May Lorde was already number one on Spotify’s Viral Chart–it wasn’t until June that traditional radio began to play “Royals.” Fast forward to today, Lorde’s music has been streamed 100 million times on Spotify (not to mention 92 million views just for “Royals” on Youtube) and is number one on the Billboard Hot 100, beating out the likes of Eminem and Miley Cyrus.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenberton...superstar/

2014:

Taylor Swift to Spotify: You can’t stream ‘1989’ or any of my music

... Swift had a history of challenging streaming services, like Spotify, most notably through a Wall Street Journal piece she wrote in June. There she opined that streaming and piracy are essentially the same. She also withheld her last album, “Red,” from Spotify for a few weeks, before relenting.

Swift is just the latest — albeit the highest profile — threat to Spotify’s business model. In the last few months, Jimmy Buffett asked Spotify for a raise and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke yanked his tunes from the service in protest.

Two years ago, Damon Krukowski of Galaxie 500 calculated that a single album sale would net him more cash than 47,680 streams on Spotify or 312,000 streams on Pandora.

Spotify had admitted it pays artists less than a penny per listen, compared to the 7 to 10 cents a singer will get from the purchase of a song for 99 cents on iTunes.

Still, industry insiders say Swift’s muscle flexing is a pure business move.

...“If she becomes a free agent, the value of Big Machine will dramatically decrease,” says Gilbert. “It’s crucial that they show significant sales for this new album.”

That’s increasingly difficult to do in an age when consumers favor streaming to purchasing. In the first half of 2014, streams increased 42% over the year before, according to Nielsen/SoundScan. Meanwhile, song sales plunged 11% and full album sales are in a 19% freefall this year.

That explains why Spotify wasn’t exactly singing the blues.

“We love Taylor, and our more than 40 million users love her even more,” the company said in a statement. “We hope she changes her mind and joins us in building a new music economy that works for everyone.”

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment...-1.1997766

^ Notice it says 40 million users, not 75 million?

2015:

Spotify CEO: Irking Taylor Swift was a 'big success'

When music megastar Taylor Swift removed her tunes from Spotify, she ended up helping the service she was speaking out against, Chief Executive Daniel Ek said Monday.

"The middle of America found out what Spotify was, so we had a big success," Ek said, speaking via video conference at the IAB Mixx interactive advertising conference in New York. "I wish we could have gotten that attention in a better way than pissing off Taylor Swift."