London-headquartered Spotify has flipped two fingers up at Apple’s new Music streaming service with the double-whammy announcement of a $526m funding round going live with the news that 20 million people are paying for its service worldwide.
Just a year ago, the company says it had 10 million ad-free subscribers paying £9.99 each and 40 million active users who use it for free in exchange for listening to advertisers’ content. These figures have now grown to 20 million and 75 million respectively.
This is the company’s eight and far largest funding round, bringing the total amount raised since it launched back in 2008 to $1.1bn. The round was joined by 13 investment firms, including Goldman Sachs, Lansdowne Partners and Halcyon Asset Management.
On the news of Apple’s anticipated service launch, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek tweeted simply: “Oh, ok.”, before deleting the flippant remark.