Spotify Sees Jump In Paying Customers With 10 Million Premium Subscribers

Spotify,  the Swedish music streaming service, has seen a surge in the number of paying subscribers and active users over the last year. Today Spotify revealed it had signed up 10 million paying customers for its Spotify Premium service, and now has  more than 40 million active users across the globe.

The new data showed a 66% increase in both paying customers and active users overall. The last time Spotify shared data it had 6 million premium customers and 24 million active users.

Two weeks ago the music business was thrown into a frenzy after news hit that Apple was buying Beats By Dr. Dre for $3.2 billion. Beats makes both popular headphones and offers a music streaming service similar to Spotify's. It's still unclear whether Apple bought Beats for its headphones or its music platform, but most people I've spoken with say it was a hardware play--after all, Apple's iTunes music store already has the most lucrative music licencing deal in the industry.

What the Beats and Apple marriage means for Spotify remains to be unseen. But the latest data from Spotify shows the company is growing at a healthy pace. With 10 million subscribers paying an average of $120 a year-- Spotify is collecting $1.2 billion subscription revenue alone. That isn't counting the ad revenue it makes from its popular free service and corporate deals like the one it announced last month with Sprint and HTC .

So how much is Spotify worth? Hard to say, but here's a quick and dirty calculation: Take $1.2 billion in subscription revenue and apply Pandora's frothy 6.90X price-to-sales ratio and you get a valuation of $8.3 billion. That's without counting any advertising revenue corporate deals. Either way, it's safe to say that Spotify has entered the $10 billion club.