Spotify's second music revolution - Telegraph Digital music has meant the death of the cassette and the CD, and it's also transformed the record industry. At an event in New York this week, the most disruptive online music service heralded what it claims is the next stage of that revolution. Rather than simply being a place for music fans to listen to songs they know they like, Spotify made a push to become the best place for people to discover the music they will like next, too, offering music enthusiasts "an amazing connection between artists and their fans that hasn't been possible before." The online music service's challenge to existing platforms such as iTunes, as well as radio stations, is driven by new partnerships with musicians themselves, who will now actively recommend new music, as well as relationships with media such as Time Out, which will recommend its favourite new releases. It will also upgrade its recommendation engines, to add new features that look at what people listen to, who is touring nearby and encourage people to try new things. Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, said there were 24 million active users, one in five of whom pay for the service. UK subscribers, for £9.99 a month, get unlimited access via mobile and PC to a library of tracks without any adverts, and the remainder use a free version with commercials that is not available on smartphones. Ek claimed that Spotify had paid more than $500 million (£312 million) to musicians in royalties, and that users had created more than a billion playlists. To those who claim that Spotify and iTunes have meant the death of the album, he added that a third of those are simply albums added as playlists and that users listen to more albums rather than fewer. Such figures suggest that industry concerns about digital music killing their model are, if not premature, then certainly overstated. But Ek conceded that users who knew what music they liked had benefited more from Spotify more than those who wanted to find out about new songs or albums. So over the coming weeks, people will be able to follow playlists from Barack Obama, Florence and the Machine and Paul McCartney, as well as digital music refuseniks Metallica, whose tracks are finally coming to the platform. Ek said the new services were only available now because of the internet. Each user's Spotify would look much more personalised, based on those enhanced recommendation engines, in a move that means the service will offer features similar to those available from smaller rivals such as Rdio. The company said: "From today, music discovery becomes truly personal. It becomes central to the Spotify experience as the service brings artists and fans closer together than ever before. "Users tell us they don't know what to listen to, and artists tell us they want to connect more closely with fans," said Ek.