Is Spotify A Trojan Horse For Music Record Labels?

Over the last 24 hours, a raft of data has emerged over the way popular Swedish online music streaming service Spotify is being run and how it appears to be almost artificially propped up by the major recording labels.

Earlier in September, we tried to work out how much money Spotify was making; based on secondary data collected on the web and using some back-of-envelopes calculations, we guesstimated that Spotify could be making up to £19 million per year.

Now Out-law reports that Spotify almost certainly making more than £13 million per year, with between 100,000 to 600,000 premium customers in six countries, each spending on average £9.99 per month on the service.

Spotify also told Out-law that it has six million users (Swedishwire says that that figure was reached at the beginning of August)  and in a separate instance, the CEO of the company, Daniel Ek, revealed to Techcrunch that the percentage of Spotify users that were premium subscribers was below 10 percent but in the "six figures".

Furthermore, the Guardian's Charles Arthur published two separate articles that point to an only conclusion. That in theory, Spotify shouldn't have survived under normal conditions because calculations show that it spends around £10 million per month, even when using conservative figures.