Spotify hits 320,000 paid for users

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Ek said he wanted “music to be like water” in terms of how it should flow easily from device to device. The company sees a big opportunity in developing for mobile devices, not just in terms of enabling people to access a huge number of tracks, but also offering the complex features and rich UI that many phones’ in built media players don’t.

“The key with Spotify, is that it will enable your music library on all kind of devices, whether it’s a phone, set-top box or game console,” said Ek, appealing to the tech-savy crowd with the opinion that “if music legally could be on any device in a way that’s as simple as it is to get music from iTunes to the iPhone, then the music industry would be radically bigger.”

Napster love

It’s clear he’s still something of a geek at heart, mentioning how he first fell in love with digital music when using Napster.

“You could see someone’s music collection, and you could see what other stuff that person was listening to. For me that was the ultimate thing, and we want to get close to that [with Spotify],” he said.

Referencing Napster might be a good way to excite a geeky crowd but it’s something of a red rag to the music industry, and Ek tried to sound a more conciliatory note at various points in the discussion.

According to Ek, “it’s about a mix of models. You’ll still buy the music you love, not as a dumb plastic disc, but perhaps as a special edition. We want to be a platform for artists to reach out to audience – and monetise that.”

30 per cent of Spotify playlists are whole albums, a sign, according to Ek, that the album is a concept people are still interested in.

He finished the show by offering some details of the amount of data Spotify uses – more than Sweden does as a whole country – and that clever use of P2P technology, in particular local sharing between machines on the same network helps manage this astonishing data use.

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