A year after launch, U.S. Spotify users have listened to 13B songs, shared 27.8M

Streaming music service Spotify has plenty of nifty stats to share on its first year in the U.S., including the fact that U.S. listeners have jammed to more than 13 billion songs.

Spotify launched in the U.S. on July 14, 2011, joining a wave of other streaming music services like Rdio and Mog that familiarized Americans with the concept of streaming music. Since then, the service has amassed more than 3 million users in the U.S., about 20 percent of whom are paying customers, according to April figures from the New York Post.

If you’ve been living under a rock for a year, Spotify is a service that lets you stream millions of music tracks for free. For $5 a month, you get unlimited access to Spotify’s library and no advertisements. And for $10 a month (which I like to call music Nirvana), you unlock Spotify’s full mobile experience, which lets you listen to any track on the service from your phone and download playlists for offline listening.

Spotify users in the U.S. have shared 27,834,742 songs since launch, with 55.3 percent shared through Facebook and 41.5 percent within Spotify itself. Those hefty Facebook numbers are due to Spotify’s extensive integration with the social network, as well as the fact that Spotify started forcing new users to use their Facebook accounts last September. Surprisingly, only 2.7 percent of Spotify shares occurred through Facebook.

Spotify’s transformation into a music platform last November, with the announcement of Spotify apps, has also been a smashing success. The company says that U.S. users have spent around 2,700 years (or 23.7 million hours) within its apps. (Check out five of our favorite Spotify apps here.)

Rdio was actually my first taste of streaming music freedom, but Spotify quickly won me over with its social playlists and better music quality. The Spotify desktop app has become my go-to desktop music player (it’s even more useful now that I’m working across a Mac and Windows PC), and I’ve made a habit of pushing all my new music to an offline playlist on the Spotify iPhone app.

Spotify now sports more than 18 million tracks and 20 million active users globally (3 million of which are paying users).

The company is based in Sweden and has offices worldwide. So far Spotify has raised around $188 million in funding, and it’s reportedly seeking a massive new round that could value it  at up to $3.5 billion.