Spotify Usage Explodes After F8, Facebook Integration

2:33 PM PDT 9/30/2011 by Eliot Van Buskirk

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The music app jumped from roughly three to five million monthly users since the Sept. 22 conference.

What's cooler than three million monthly active users? Five million monthly active users. Spotify, which launched in America after a few modifications on July 14, saw monthly usage increase over 50 percent following the September 22 Facebook F8 conference, where Spotify CEO and co-founder Daniel Ek took the stage to talk about Spotify's new integration with Facebook. On the day of the F8 announcement, approximately 3.4 million people had used Spotify so far that month according to AppData.

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As of today, it lists Spotify as having about 5.3 million monthly active users -- an approximate 56 percent increase. That said, daily usage has dipped since the announcement, possibly in part due to the phenomenon we're calling " Dissed Connections."

Obviously, this chart shows a big spike right after the announcement, but more importantly, its new baseline appears higher than it was before. Like other music services including MOG, Rdio, and Slacker, Spotify now adds your listening activity to your friends' Facebook feeds, so they can listen to and comment on your songs (unless you don't want it to). In retrospect, this came as no surprise, because the first time I met Daniel Ek, for breakfast in New York in July 2009, he told me he didn't envision Spotify as a music social network -- instead, he said, he'd rather let someone else build the social network. That someone turned out to be Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook integration seems to be working well for Spotify based on its September numbers. Whether it can keep that up next month is another story -- and from where we're sitting, largely depends on whether Spotify can convince people to use its upcoming Private Listening feature when they don't want to share, rather than disconnecting Spotify from Facebook permanently.