Spotify has been busy over the last few months, launching brand apps, adding more social functionality through a partnership with Turntable.fm competitor Soundrop, overhauling its Android app, adding a Play button, and more.
And it seems that the company has hit a few more scaling milestones recently: According to AppData, there are more than 18 million monthly active users now on the Spotify platform. While Spotify CEO Daniel Ek wouldn’t confirm the AppData number, he did say that the company was at 17 million tracks and 700 million playlists across the platform.
“We’re growing really fast, and the U.S. is our fastest growing market,” Ek said.
The numbers have grown since a February presentation given by one of Spotify’s early developers, Jon Aslund, who joined the company in 2006. In a recent lecture at Uppsala University in Sweden, Aslund shared a number of interesting tidbits about Spotify’s early history, and growth (sent to us by a Tipster).
The leaked deck includes a snapshot of the first sketch of what eventually became Spotify’s user interface. The pre-UI drawing is obviously very basic, and Ek told us that it was completed in Stockholm, on, funnily enough, MacPaint. “As you can tell my drawing skills were not that great,” he says, “and at the time we were only Swedish people so it is in Swedish.”
Herein, you can see (my Swedish not being perfect) the early foundation of what became Spotify player’s interface, with “Search” at the top left, “My Library” on the left side, playlists/files in the middle, and “Parent Library” on the right.
Web advertising is included at the bottom right, and in the footer, while tracks are shown at the top. In concept, it looks pretty similar to a MacPaint-style iTunes, doesn’t it?
Aslund also included confirmation of a few other Spotify stats floating around, including the fact that as of February 2012 the company had over 15 million tracks, with over 500 million playlists created. Also of note: The startup has over 1,000 servers operating across three countries.
The early Spotify engineer also made reference to Spotify’s speed, and explained how Spotify works in engineering terms across a distributed system, and presumably, judging by slides, how the company combines consistency, tolerance, and partition tolerance for maximum efficiency. Image below.
All in all, the deck is a cool glimpse into the presentation that Aslund, and perhaps other early Spotify engineers are using to go out and recruit top talent at local universities.
Check out the deck below:
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