KCRW To Be Sole Radio Station Featured On Spotify’s New Music Discovery Platform

Spotify has announced that KCRW’s Music Mine will be featured on its upcoming music discovery service. KCRW will be the only radio station among the 25 partners…

When Spotify rolls out its new music discovery platform next year, it will have 25 partners — and only one of those partners will be a radio station.

And that station will be KCRW.

KCRW was the first U.S. radio station to launch an app on Spotify, and the app, called Music Mine, is now among the most popular.

KCRW will curate a number of streams for Spotify, based on the KCRW Music Blog: Best New Music, Morning Becomes Eclectic, and more.

“Music lovers overwhelmed by choice have long turned to KCRW to guide the way and, thanks to partners like Spotify, we can now do what we do best on an international level,” said Betsy Moyer, Director of Digital Content Strategy in a statement released by the station.

In related news this week, Spotify this week announced that it now has 1 million paying subscribers in the United States. Overall, the service has 6 million paying subs and 20 million users overall.

It is the opinion of many that, at current royalty rates, streaming services must achieve a significant paying subscriber base to be successful since sliding online and mobile advertising rates are unlikely to keep up with the costs.

Responding to criticism of opaque accounting practices, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek reiterated that 70% of the company’s revenues are paid out to rights holders, and the amount paid out has now exceeded $500 million.