Spotify is on a roll, having recently reached a major milestone of 2.5 million total subscribers to the music platform.  The company is achieving exponential growth and has increased its base by half a million subscribers in just two months. The announcement is an important reminder for competitors like Rhapsody, or even the brand new Google Music initiative.

The Swedish company has carried out a business strategy consisting of a territorial expansion that finally brought Spotify to the US, where it raked in more than 250,000 subscribers.

In their official blog, Spotify put out some clues towards some exciting new developments in their music service.  “We’ll continue to focus on providing you with the best music service possible. We’ve got some exciting developments in the works, which we’ll share with you very soon.”

Facebook Effect

The Swedish company also broadened its user base with integration on Facebook, which opened the door to more than 800 million users.  Spotify is one of those entertainment services that exploits the Facebook platform, all but forcing new subscribers hands in connecting the two accounts.  Leveraging Facebook’s Open Graph technology, Spotify has nevertheless attracted some criticism, especially since it became mandatory to have a Facebook account to register on Spotify.  Nevertheless, Facebook said that since the beginning of this partnership, Spotify has acquired some 4 million new users.

Music mayhem – an industry strives for new success

Competition only continues to grow in this new era of the music industry. The major players are expanding and optimizing services to capture more subscribers. It’s a safe bet, as the online music industry is hoping to raise millions upon millions in funds in the coming years.  And Spotify seems poised to capture a good portion of the pie with its 2.5 million subscribers.

But Grooveshark is facing some dilemmas of its own.  Accused of illegally hosting more than 100k songs from Universal Music, Grooveshark calls the charges unjustified.  The music service will defend themselves against allegations, with Vice-President for Legal Affairs, Marshall Custer, responding to the claim.

“The complaint from Universal is almost entirely false, anonymous comment on a blog, and a gross distortion of information that Grooveshark has himself provided to Universal,” said Custer, head of legal department of the streaming service. “While the latter has chosen to engage in battle in the media, we intend to fight in the courts, not in the press.”

Universal Music is the largest of the four major music labels, and represents artists like U2, Elton John and Lady Gaga.  The record company requested an injunction to close the service. Universal is also demanding the maximum penalty of $150,000 per song for copyright violation.

Universal is not the only company that raises questions about the conduct of Grooveshark. In early November the Danish piracy fighter Rettigheds Alliancen music streaming service challenged Grooveshark to court for uploading illegal content to their site.

Then there was the launch of Apple’s long-awaited iTunes Match service last week. The new cloud-based service can automatically download music from its iTunes Store to other certified devices.  Apple has about 20 million songs stored on its servers–iTunes Match searches your computer’s hard drive and identifies the songs that Apple holds.

The negative side is that Apple charges $24.99 a year for up to 25,000 songs. Google Music, a service that had a full-fledge launch last week, will store up to 20,000 tunes for free.