Spotify loses its brain

And cuts prices

By Andrew Orlowski • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 28th October 2009 11:04 GMT

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The former is a bit of a shocker. You'd expect a CTO for one of the most-talked-about startups to want to stick around, but Spotify has lost its tech supremo. But Anderas Ehn, described as the "brains" of Spotify, doesn't seem to think so. He's got a better offer, he wrote yesterday on his Twitter feed.

Spotify's valuation of over €200m (still climbing) and the prospect of some interesting interesting technical challenges, such as video on demand, wasn't enough to keep him on board.

Ehn is one of the original team of six that set up Spotify, and he designed the system and recruited the developers. He had previously worked with co-founder Daniel Ek at startup Stardoll. Despite professing an admiration for Californian New Age flake Tim 2.0'Reilly, there's no doubt that Ehn's technical team has done a fine job: performance is outstanding, while the system has had to scale rapidly to cope with 2 million users.

Meanwhile new UK subscribers can take advantage of a £6.99 subscription for six months, reports Billboard. The offer expires on November 2, and is effectively an £18 rebate. Tough luck if you signed up to Spotify's tenner-a-month subscription, and if you did the decent thing, and signed up to the annual £120 subscription... then you're a wally.*

In public, Spotify claims a 10 per cent conversion. However, information we've seen suggests this is may not actually be the case - and we'll have much more on this very soon. So you may want to subscribe to our Music & Media Blogorrhea RSS feed to get this news before somebody else. ®

*Oops Billboard goofed, and there is no way to get the offer. Spotify apparently sent out emails experimenting with various offers to a limited number of existing users, it seems. Sorry for the confusion.

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