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
http://twitter.com/#!/hunterwalk/status/102924012975423488
http://twitter.com/#!/teymourff/status/103071343460876289