Spotify.com News Playlist: Metallica, Android, Apple, MySpace

    Since we last covered Spotify, a lot of interesting things have taken place. Instead of boring you with a lot details about straightforward news, we decided to put together a “playlist” of the recent news on Spotify.

    Perhaps one of the most melodramatic occurrences was the “making up” between Sean Parker (Investor and member of the board at Spotify) and Lars Ulrich from Metallica. The two seem to have sorted out the Napster incident and announced together that Metallica will come to Spotify. This is definitely going to make the fans happy and bring in new listeners.

    To help find Metallica or any other songs, Spotify has recently introduced Discovery and Follow features.

    Which means that you can follow Metallica and others in order to get updates about new songs, concerts and news. This brings a lot of new content to Spotify and also an even deeper social aspect. Perhaps also a roadmap towards new revenue models.

    All of this activity will also be fed into the new discovery engine. This is great news for people like me, who are not quite sure what to listen to and are happy to let an artificially intelligent algorithm tell us how to proceed in life.

    In other news Spotify launched a brand new Android application. They have re-designed it top to bottom with Android 4.0 in mind. This is very timely as Android is well on it’s way to take over the world (At least in terms of market share). This might help them grow their user base, profits and valuation.

    Still, with $3.5 billion dollar valuation, 20 million active users (5 million paid) and $61 million operating loss, Spotify is not in the clear and is vulnerable to attacks from competitors.

    Recently there have been plenty of rumors about Apple with entering the streaming market but that is not all, it might also be challenged by the less known and/or expected competitors.

    Take the new MySpace for instance, which is set to re-launch soon. In comparison to Spotify they are aiming to keep all the music free by paying for it thanks to beautiful, visual on-site advertisement. They also do not have any “clients”, as it’s all in the browser (And looks stunning). Then there is Deezer, a french rival that raised $130 million in funding. It is definitely going to be interesting to see how/if and when Spotify will start showing a profit.

    All in all, we are not quite sure how the playlist is going to play out, but we are definitely going to be listening. How about you?