Spotify Kills Purchased Download Links (Not That It Mattered Anyway)

    Spotify has gotten rid of purchased download links, but it doesn’t seem to matter one way or another. Spotify’s revenue is doing just fine from paid subscriptions and ads to its free service. At a press event in early December, Spotify has released some statistics on its streaming service. Spotify counts over 20 million users as “regular users” and has over 5 million paying customers.

    Evolver.fm “did the math” and estimates that Spotify would be churning in an annual revenue of $621 million if it grew no further this year. With Spotify’s exponential growth (as shown by doubling its user base last year) they predict that Spotify will hit above the $1 Billion revenue mark for 2013.

    But one bullet point in Spotify’s business plan has been tracks to purchase and download. It was obvious from the outset that downloaded tracks didn’t really fit into Spotify’s worldview, and in late December or early January, they killed the functionality of selling music through their service. Apparently no one is quite sure when Spotify stopped supporting downloaded links, likely because no one really used it.

    Now when clicking on a purchase link on Spotify, a pop-up states, “We’re no longer supporting new download purchases on Spotify.”

    Pocket Lint was the first one to notice, and Spotify responded to their questions by issuing a statment saying,

    “We recently updated Spotify to further simplify the service and pave the way for new features announced at the end of last year,” the company told us. “In-app purchases aren’t part of this update but we’re not ruling out their return. Credits/gift cards already purchased are still redeemable.”

    As a bonus, check out Spotify’s Review of the Year, which allows you to find out what the top tracks and artists were for each country in 2012.