Spotify reaches 4M paying subscribers

Just as the London music service updates it Android app, it announces doubling paid members

As the world's eyes are on London to see how the city fairs at hosting all of the best athletes across the globe, one London tech company, Spotify, has released its numbers showing significant growth in its user base and paid memberships.

Just ten months ago, Spotify had roughly 4 million users, half of which were paying the premium monthly membership fee and now the service has 15 million active users and more than 4 million of them are paying for the ability to listen to almost any song on various devices.

So, while the percentage of paying users has dropped from 50% to about 27%, doubling paying members is impressive growth for less than a year.

The streaming music company also just released an update for its Android app that added a mobile radio function to give current and new users even more options.

Spotify launched its free mobile radio service for iOS in June, allowing users to create stations based on a selected song, artist, or album. The Pandora-like offering continues to add value to the Spotify brand, which got an exceptional boost when it integrated with Facebook and was one of the cornerstone services for the Facebook Open Graph -- letting people see what their friends are listening to and increase music discovery. 

Competitors like iHeartRadio, Pandora and Rdio now are at a disadvantage because they only offer the station creation service and do not let users play any song they want on-demand.  

While paid users get uninterrupted listening enjoyment, free users can listen as long as they like with advertisement interruptions. 

Other Spotify updates this summer 

Just a few weeks ago, Yahoo and Spotify announced that they teamed up to promote and distribute each other’s content.

The agreement between the two companies allows Yahoo to “integrate and promote Spotify's on demand music service on Yahoo's Media Network.” The Yahoo network has nearly 700 million unique visitors every month, nearly half of the entire Internet.

Spotify will first be available through Yahoo Music, and will be accessable on other Yahoo services, including Yahoo Movies and omg!. Yahoo will also create an app for Spotify that integrates Yahoo content.

Currently, the only way to sign up for a Spotify account is through Facebook, but the deal with Yahoo, plus other recent move, signal that it wants to grow into something bigger.

Yahoo previously tried to build its very own on-demand music streaming service, Yahoo Music Unlimited, in 2005, but the service closed just three years later. By integrating the already successful Spotify into their platform, Yahoo is avoiding experiencing the same failure, as well as bringing in what is already a fairly sizable audience.