14 DAY TRIAL // Spotify seems to be on a roll lately, not only is it getting very close to launching in the US, thanks to licensing deals with the major record labels, but it has also raised $100 million from several investors at a valuation of about $1 billion.
According to All Things D, Spotify has closed its latest funding round which netted it $100 million from the likes of DST, Kleiner Perkins and Accel, major players in venture capital.
Spotify has been working on this latest round for a few months now, but it has only now managed to sign a deal. There's not much more info on the new funding round, but the essentials are enough.
Even though it's been fairly popular in Europe, it's going to need the money if it wants to continue to grow or launch in the US. Spotify has about one million paying subscribers for its service and several millions more using the free service in the European countries it's available in.
But it is also burning a lot of money, as the Pandora IPO has revealed, licensing music for this type of services is very expensive, so much so that it can cripple the company altogether.
So far, it's been able to get by with what it has raised in funding and the money it gets from subscribers. And Spotify is going to be able to do this for longer with the new money from subscribers.
But it's probably going to spend quite a bit on the US launch, which is now, finally, getting very close. Spotify only has to sign Warner to get all of the four big record labels on board and it's already in advanced talks with the label. After all of the deals are in place, Spotify can get to work on the actual details of the launch.