Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek appeared at a music industry event in London to insist that the service competes with piracy and not the high street or iTunes. He claimed eight out of ten users have given up on LimeWire and the like.

He also said, according to TechCrunch, that the proportion of premium users is still in single figures, but that "we’ve always realised that the vast majority will be free users, but as long as that’s on a big scale, that’s OK. The numbers work.”

Ek reiterated that Spotify has one million users in Sweden from a population of nine million. He suggested this kind of scale will be the key to Spotify’s chances of success, predicting that in time, he hopes for 60 per cent of the company’s revenues to come from subscriptions, versus 40 per cent from advertising.

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