Spotify is 1 year old

Happy birthday to the Swedish streaming music service

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7 October 2009 16:16 GMT / By Duncan Geere

Gosh - how time flies. Streaming music service Spotify is 1 year old today. The company opened up its service into private beta on 7 October 2008, and was roundly ignored by most of the world's media.

Following hyperbolic blog posts from the few people who'd managed to get invitations, the service ramped up slowly - both in terms of catalogue and in terms of adverts on the system - which originally featured the now legendary Roberta from Spotify (pictured).

The service launched publicly in the UK early the following year, launched a since-neglected API shortly after, and then launched a mobile application more recently in an attempt to bulk up its paying userbase.

The company said in a blog post: "Over the past year we've worked hard to continue to improve Spotify. We’ve more than doubled the size of our music catalogue over the year and work continues to add more content each week".

Spotify has also shared a few statistics about its service. Apparently listening to every song in the entire catalogue would take more than 34 years with no sleep allowed, more than one in nine Swedes are Spotify users, and it streams "billions" of tracks every month. Apparently tens of thousands of new users join each day.

But since the company's hype bubble burst, many have questioned whether the service can afford to keep up its free streaming long-term. CEO Daniel Ek tweeted the other day: "Thinking about writing about the state of ad-supported music. I know what the industry thinks, but I think they're wrong". Time will tell whether or not he's right.

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