Spotify’s impressive growth continues, with 2.5M paying subscribers

Streaming music service Spotify has over 2.5 million paying subscribers — a 25 percent increase since September, the startup announced today.

Spotify’s premium service is a paid, ad-free version of its streaming music service that lets people share playlists. The premium service has continued to grow at a healthy rate since launching to U.S. customers in July, due in part to a major partnership with social network giant Facebook. To jump-start that partnership, Spotify decided to force all new users to have a Facebook account if they wanted to join. For now, it appears that the company’s strategy is paying off.

But despite impressive growth, Spotify is also dealing with some bumps in the road. Earlier this week we reported that 200 independent music labels ended their licensing agreement with Spotify because it was hurting their digital sales. Spotify still has licensing agreements with all the major music labels, but if that were to change, it could affect the company’s growth.

Spotify is planning to announce a “new direction” for the company November 30. It’s likely that the company will go into greater detail about its growth as well as what to expect from the service in the future (perhaps a Spotify MP3 store, iPad app, or exclusive content).