REPORT: Spotify Hits 70,000 Paid Subscribers In The US, Hits Mark After 1 Week

After launching in the U.S. only a week ago, Spotify reportedly has 70,000 paid users.
Over the last week, invites have been a hot ticket and many companies were giving them out for free accounts and trials of paid subscriptions. It seems like all the buzz and the long wait for a U.S. launch is starting to pay off for the service. According to Billboard, 3 label and publishing executives confirmed that Spotify had hit the 70,000 subscriber mark.
After a difficult launch process where Spotify struggled to secure contracts with major record labels, they’re very pleased with their success. Angela Watts, VP of Marketing for Spotify, said:

The launch of Spotify in the US has exceeded our expectations in both the response to invitations for the free service as well as subscriptions. We aren’t going to discuss numbers at this stage but we are excited to be here and confident that Americans will love Spotify as much as they already do in Europe.

It’s difficult to really put the success of Spotify’s U.S. launch into context. Similar services like Napster and Rhapsody have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, but at the same time, it’s not like they launched a week ago. After years of existence Rhapsody has 800,000 subscribers and Napster had 761,000 before it was bought out by BestBuy in 2008.
Looking at the success of new music-sharing companies is a more definitive way to measure Spotify’s success. Muve, a mobile music service for pre-paid provider Cricket, reached 100,000 users in 6 months. Spotify almost hit that number in 7 days.
With this number of paid subscribers in just the first week, it looks like Spotify has some major room for growth, especially if they team up with Facebook, who’s an almost unstoppable force in the social networking space.
Have you managed to score an invite?