Streaming music service Spotify is amping up its hiring efforts in the US, wanting to hire another 100 employees according to a source. The total team is currently around 380 people.
One month after its US launch, Spotify has hired Zynga executive Teymour Farman-Farmaian as “Chief Acquisition & [Ad Business] Retention Officer.” From what I’m hearing Farman-Farmain will be in a business development-type role, scaling the streaming music product through partnerships as well as running business and support operations. According to the same source he will be reporting directly to Spotify CEO Daniel Ek.
Prior to Spotify, Farman-Farmaian was General Manager of Strategic Partnerships at Zynga, where he led some of the gaming company’s early relationship work with Facebook. [Note: If anyone knows about scale it's someone from Zynga.] Before Zynga, Farman-Farmain was at Google, where he directed sales for Latin America and Asia Pacific.
On the day of US-launch, Spotify sent out a press release stating that it had 10 million registered users and 1.6 million paying subscribers in Europe, boasting a ratio of over 15% subscribers to active users. Peter Kafka is reporting that as of August 8th, Spotify had 1.4 million registered US users, with 175K paying (a 12.5% ratio).
According to one source, the actual total Spotify registered user numbers are over 15 million (“closer to 20 million”) and Kafka’s 1.4 million number is “slightly” low but the 175K paying number is right, which would make the US ratio of paying to non-paying users even lower than 12.5%.
The company also recently hired San Francisco tech scene fixture Andrew Mager (from SimpleGeo) as a developer evangelist of some sort working out of its NY office. Now if only it would build a feature that would let you reply to songs that people send to your inbox.
Image: Teymour Farman-Farmaian
Rockstar exec @teymourff joined @Spotify as Chief Acquisition & Retention Officer. ex-Zynga & ex-Google so he knows a bit about scale
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Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) August 15, 2011
Spotify is a new challenge. All about user long term subscriptions. Google was ad paid. Zynga was impulse purchase. Need new metrics.—
Teymour (@teymourff) August 15, 2011
Spotify has created a lightweight software application that allows instant listening to specific tracks or albums with virtually no buffering delay. It was launched in the fall of 2008 and had approximately 10 million users by September 2010. Spotify offers streaming music from major and independent record labels including Sony, EMI, Warner Music Group, and Universal. Users download Spotify and then log onto their service enabling the on-demand streaming of music. Music can be browsed by artist, album, record...
Teymour Farman-Farmaian is Chief Acquisition & Retention Officer at Spotify. Before, he was General Manager of Strategic Partnerships at Zynga and prior to that he worked at Google, Time Warner Cable and Procter & Gamble.
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