So, how many people actually pay to use Spotify?
That question has been critical for the music industry, which sees Spotify's model - streaming an unlimited number of songs for a small monthly fee - as representing a potentially huge shift in the way people listen to music. But it's a model that still gives many artists and record labels the willies because of the way it pays royalties.
Spotify, which is four years old and is now available in 15 countries, has been slow in revealing detailed user information, but on Tuesday it updated its stats. At an industry conference in London, a Spotify executive said that the service had 15 million monthly users around the world, and that four million of them are paying subscribers.
That is an increase of one million paying users since the company's last update in January, although, as Billboard points out, it appears to have taken Spotify longer to gain this most recent mill ion subscribers than it did the million before. (The subscription price varies from country to country, but is generally between $5 and $15 a month.)
There are still plenty of aspects of Spotify's usage that the company is not so transparent about, however. It has not said how many of its users are located in the United States, and it also does not reveal precise numbers about how it pays royalties, although earlier this year Daniel Ek, its co-founder, said the service has paid $200 million to rights holders.
Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.
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