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Main on August 7th, 2009 by Pingdom
Spotify, the European peer-to-peer music streaming service that gives its users access to millions of songs for free is gaining more buzz every day. The service already has millions of users and has managed what many thought was impossible: it got the big record labels on board a free service and gained access to their music libraries.
Spotify has deals with Sony BMG, Universal Music, Warner Music, EMI and Merlin. The first four of these are often called the “big four” record companies.
How did Spotify pull this off?
It turns out that Spotify made the record companies shareholders early on. In October 2008 when Spotify was launched, the big five record labels above together got nearly a fifth of the Spotify stock (18% to be exact) for a mere 100,000 SEK (less than 14,000 USD).
This was revealed today by the Swedish IT magazine Computer Sweden (article in Swedish).
To put this in perspective, Spotify recently got a $250 million valuation at a recent round of VC funding.
Of course, Spotify had to have presented the record companies with an attractive business model, but making them shareholders was probably a pretty good move to sweeten the deal, giving them a stake in what is looking to become a hugely successful service.
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Mobile podcast on February 9th, 2012 by Pingdom
Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.
In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending approval of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We also talked about Nokia’s recent financial results, if Google Chrome can hit more than 50% market share this year, and the recent privacy-blunder by the guys behind the Path mobile app.
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Main on February 9th, 2012 by Pingdom
There’s no denying that Google Chrome continues to be the darling of the web browser market. And as we predicted in July last year, Chrome overtook Firefox around November 2011.
So now the question is, when will Google also wrestle down Internet Explorer, and become the undisputed king of the browser world? In December 2011, Chrome 15 became the most popular browser in the world, beating Internet Explorer 8, but if you combine all IE versions, Microsoft still holds the number 1 spot.
Equipped with the latest web browser statistics from StatCounter, we set out to see when Chrome is likely to achieve more than 50% market share.
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Main on February 8th, 2012 by Pingdom
Want to see how your favorite US sports site is doing, if it has a perfect 100% uptime score or not? If you want to check the latest scores and it isn’t working, could it be a problem with your computer or connection, or the site? We’ve got the solution for you!
For some time now we’ve been monitoring 34 major US sports and news sites related to sports. Our recent articles on the Super Bowl are a result of that monitoring.
Now you can look at how these sites are doing yourself on the public reports page for this list of US sports websites.
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Main on February 8th, 2012 by Pingdom
Who has not used Google Maps? Raise your hand! Since the launch 7 years ago, Google Maps has become the de facto map service that users around the world go to for all their mapping needs.
As we say Happy Birthday to Google Maps, read on to find out some of the critical milestones in its history, and some amazing numbers and statistics.
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In 2010, there were just over 1 million secure Internet websites worldwide. Almost half of those, or 446,992 to be exact, were located in the United States.
But in which country can we find the most secure websites in relation to population? The answer may surprise you.
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Marcus
August 7th, 2009 at 4:21 am
We have an English version of the story up now: http://computersweden.idg.se/2.2683/1.240046/documents-reveal-major-labels-own-part-of-spotify
Philipp
August 7th, 2009 at 6:27 am
Question is, are they as motivated to care for their holdings when they did not pay for it? I.e. will they milk spotify for the VCs money and then pull out. If they would have paid for it, they would certainly be much more inclined to make the company successful than in this scenario. The ooportunity cost is near zero if the price is near zero, i guess.