UPDATED 11:05 EDT / AUGUST 08 2011

Spotify Update: US Launch Delivers $1.1B Valuation, Facing Lawsuits

Spotify graced the US digital airwaves just a month ago, and it was quickly hit by an infringement lawsuit, as is the American way.  Spotify, tirelessly compared to other music services like iTunes, Pandora, Turntable.fm, has a unique battle to fight in the US in particular, even if some are trying to rain on its parade.  However, it doesn’t seem as though much of anything can slow down this British invasion.

In just over a month after their US release, Spotify has already raised about €69 ($98.15) million at a valuation of €774 ($1101.02) million.  The funding came in two parts, one in which existing investors put in €55 ($78.24) million and another in which new investors provided €14 ($19.92) million.

Spotify’s big-time current investors and members – directors board comprises of Napster co-founder Sean Parker, Spotify co-founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, and Wellington partner Frank Böhnke plus Northzone partner Pär-Jörgen Pärson, while its management board comprises INQ Mobile CEO Frank Meehan, plus Creandum partner Fredrik Cassel (ING owner Hutchison Whampoa’s chair Li Ka-Shing is a previous investor), and more are looking to invest, especially when shares to existing and new investors were valued at €276 ($392.61) per share.

With such a high valuation and growing success, Spotify is also incurring an ecosystem all its own.  The Windows add-on Equalify allows a little more control over the way your music sounds in Spotify that allows you to change the bass, mid, and treble in real-time while the music is playing.

So what can bring them down?  Maybe their €26.5 ($37.7) million annual loss?  Or maybe the fact that they are once again faced with another lawsuit, this time involving Kissmetrics, a service that increases purchases on your website by visualizing your online sales funnels and figuring out which campaigns are driving revenue and which ones aren’t.  By using Kissmetrics, when you download from Spotify, a cookie never disappears and it acquires personal information about the user.  On a released statement by Spotify, they stated that:

“Spotify takes the privacy of its users incredibly seriously, and we expect the same of our suppliers. Like many companies, we use third party services to understand and improve upon how customers use our website and service. One product that Spotify has used to help us understand customer registration and purchase flow, and to make the process of using our website as easy as possible for users, is KISSmetrics. Following the recent report raising concerns around KISSmetrics’ treatment of cookies, we took immediate action to suspend our use of KISSmetrics and began a thorough investigation. Spotify can confirm that it has never had the ability to see or use any customer information from KISSmetrics’ other clients. Kissmetrics has assured us that none of its other clients have had the ability to see or use information about Spotify’s customers. Spotify remains absolutely committed to safeguarding the privacy of our users.”


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU