Spotify, founded by the former Tradedoubler team, is understood to have raised €15.3m from Northzone Venture Partners at a monster €71.6m pre-money valuation. The service is still in private beta.
Northzone themselves have declined to comment, but Creandum, another of Sweden’s top VCs, is also understood to have taken part in the funding round. Spotif have released no statement but they recently held a large party in Stockholm. Make of that what you will.
The Stockholm-based Spotify can essentially be summed up, in the words of one blogger, as a kind of hybrid of Skype, last.fm, the iTunes Store and Bittorrent. A lightweight iTunes-like application streams songs via encrypted P2P technology. The service is ad-financed, hence the comparison with Last.fm.