Spotify hits 100m monthly users despite intensified competition from rival services

Spotify is a Swedish commercial music streaming, podcast, and video service that provides digital rights management–protected content from record labels and media companies. It is available in most of the Americas, Western Europe, and Oceania. Music can be browsed or searched by artist, album, genre, playlist, or record label.

It was launched in September 2008 by Swedish startup Spotify AB. As of June 2015 Spotify had more than 75 million active users. Now Spotify has hit a new milestone for the music streaming industry after reaching more than 100 million active monthly users, up from 75 million thus retaining its crown as the world's largest music streaming service despite intensified competition from rival services.

Spotify operates under a freemium business model, with two music streaming tiers: Spotify Free and Spotify Premium. Benefits of the Premium subscription include the removal of advertisements, improved audio quality, and optional downloading of music to devices for offline listening. Spotify enjoys the industry's largest paid monthly subscriber base, with 30 million in March 2016 – or roughly a third of customers – paying to use its premium service every month.

Earlier this year around March, Facebook made it easier to share songs with your buddies while chatting by adding Spotify support directly to its Messenger app. The update marks the first time the social network has added a major music service to its repertoire. Users can swap individual songs, playlists and artists through the "more" tab within Messenger. To share a track, playlist or artist within a message thread, select Spotify from the list of apps in the "more" tab. Once you've selected the app, search the app for your favourite tune as you normally would and share it back to Messenger.

The recipient must have the Spotify app installed on his or her device to receive the song. If they do, they can simply click on the shared link to automatically open the Spotify app to begin playback, sit back and enjoy the selection.

Apple Music has 11 million paid users as of February 2016, although its subscriber base is growing at a much faster rate.

Spotify also finds itself fending off Tidal, which launched in 2015 and currently has 540,000 paying subscribers, and faces new competition from SoundCloud, which launched its own subscription service in March. Amazon is also preparing the launch of a music streaming service, expected sometime later this year. I say competition is good.