iTunes will follow Spotify into the cloud, according to Spotify boss Daniel Ek speaking at SXSW. The Spotify head honcho also revealed how much bandwidth the music streaming service chews through and updated the officially disclosed number of paid Spotify subscribers.
Asked why Apple doesn’t use the peer-to-peer model Spotify uses to stream music, Ek replied that it was the “million dollar question”. He said he believes iTunes will eventually move towards a Spotify style model with iTunes in the cloud and iTunes subscriptions.
Ek said that Spotify now has “over 320,000 paid subscribers” with 7 million users in total. Ek said that if Spotify did not use P2P and instead relied on streaming from one UK data centre, it would gobble up all their bandwidth.
Ek explained the sheer amount of data used by Spotify with the revelation that “on certain days [Spotify is] consuming more internet capacity than Sweden as a country.”
Speculation that iTunes will hit the cloud and introduce iTunes subscriptions was not started by the Spotify boss. It’s been swirling around for some time. But we’re not sure Ek and Spotify should be so relaxed about the prospect of Apple entering the streaming battle with a new version of iTunes, apparently dubbed iTunes Replay.
Out now | from £free | Spotify (via Techcrunch)
