Spotify: 1m US Paid Subscribers, 5m Paid Worldwide

Spotify has passed the one million US paying subscribers point, marking its roughly one-year anniversary with a milestone making it, the company claims, the biggest subscription music service in the US. The company now has over 5m paying customers worldwide, CEO Daniel Ek says, doubling its paid userbase in the space of a year.

In fact, there are 20m active users – including paid and ad-supported – across seventeen markets. Playlist use has also taken off, with more than one billion playlists created; over 4.7m of those playlists are apparently called "Love."

Payments to artists, meanwhile, have also snowballed. In fact, Ek claims, royalty payments have more than doubled in the space of the past nine months, with more than half a billion dollars now paid out over Spotify's lifespan.

As for the old fear that users might cherry-pick individual tracks and contribute to the long-discussed "death of the album", Ek says that listeners actually are more likely to listen to the whole album. 80-percent of the company's catalog has been streamed, he says.