It's Expansion Season For Scandinavian Music Streaming Services

It’s expansion season for seemingly every music streaming service from the Nordics and beyond. With Spotify’s rapid grabbing of market share, competing services are differentiating themselves and aiming to get an early hold on users in countries where Spotify has yet to launch. What’s remarkable is how many of these services are coming out of Scandinavian and Baltic entrepreneurs. Here’s the rundown of the major players’ growth plans:

Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis (The Estonian and Danish founders of Skype) recently announced they have plans to take Rdio to the whole of europe in the coming months, potentially hitting countries in which Spotify has yet to launch. PaidContent says that Rdio recently added Germany, Brazil, Portugal, Spain, Australia and New Zealand to its U.S. and Canada availability as well as quietly soft-launching access in Denmark.

Meanwhile, WiMP, the Norway-based streaming service built by Aspiro, has plans on launching in Germany sometime in Q2 of this year. WiMP focuses on editorial content and to customize the service to each market. They’ve been testing out a private beta in Germany since December and says as in other countries, the German WiMP-editors provide daily music tips, editorial playlists, recommended tracks and albums, news, charts and much more to add value to listeners.

French music streaming service Deezer has been around since 2007, and at the LeWeb conference announced aggressive plans to be available in every country by June 30th of this year.

After news that Spotify is searching for more funding at a $3.5 billion valuation, critics made the point that they have no real exclusivity of their content; any new service can come along and offer a near identical solution. Spotify has been the first service to really pick up traction and feel legitimate. But how much will music consumers shop around as competing services come to town?