Having recently signed  deal with EMI, after having dealt with the 4 major record labels that were reluctant to signing sign deals for the US market, Spotify managed to overcome all barriers and is now investing a great deal of effort in offering improved services to enhance customer satisfaction; on the 5^th of April Spotify will broadcast live from a nightclub set simultaneously. This is just the beginning of Spotify moving in the direction of live event broadcasting, serving now over 1 million paid subscribers.

Spotify has a large number of unsubscribed users as well that use a free, ad-based version of the digital music service as well. Recently some of these users of the free version have been targeted by a malware attack, namely Trojan horse Generic_r.FZ.

Although Spotify has not officially launched its services on the US market, the company officials are precautionary and started hiring staff for the New York office. Steve Savoca, former head of digital at Domino Recording, will run Spotify US, along Ken Parks, former attorney for EMI Music.

Spotity’s expansion to the US and recently having reached 1 million paid subscribers indicates that music streaming services have a real potential of digging the download of albums and songs by 2016, given the increasing number of smartphone users and technological advancements that incorporate multimedia capabilities in mobile devices, according to a study conducted by ABI Research.

‘The number of subscribers to mobile music streaming services is expected to approach 5.9 million by the end of this year’, said Aapo Markkanen, analyst at ABI Research. ‘We believe that number will exceed 161 million subscribers in 2016, meaning a compound annual growth rate of nearly 95 percent’.