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The London-based company, which suffered significant losses in 2010 as it expanded to new markets, has grown rapidly in the United States. Worldwide, it now has “well north” of the 2 million paid subscriber number that Chief Executive Daniel Ek revealed last month, these people said.Digital music subscription services are hoping to pick up the slack of lost CD sales for the music business by offering large libraries of songs for an-all-you-can-eat monthly fee by streaming songs over computers, mobile devices and more recently in cars.To date, digital music has been dominated by Apple Inc’s iTunes Music Store which sells songs and albums on a download basis.Also driving momentum for Spotify is its integration with Facebook which launched on September 22 at the social network’s developer conference.Spotify has benefited from effectively being the default music service on Facebook, which has 800 million users.A Spotify spokeswoman declined to comment.Every time a Facebook user clicks on the new “Music” app tab on their home page they are connected to songs shared by their friends through Spotify. While music services including Rdio and MOG have also been integrated into Facebook, they do not have the valuable “default” status.Spotify is partly backed by digital entrepreneur Parker, who made his name as a supporter of the original Napster music service before becoming a backer of Facebook.The key challenge for digital music start-up companies like Spotify has been how to convert users of their free service or free trial to become paying subscribers. The need to ramp up subscriber revenue as quickly as possible is important for these businesses as they have to pay large fixed costs to license music from labels.Spotify previously had indicated a conversion rate of around 10 percent in Europe but has not updated the data recently.The digital music subscription market has been slow to grow so far. Rhapsody, the U.S. market leader, has 800,000 users after 10 years of being in business. But it is expected to grow to around 1.2 million after it snapped up Napster from Best Buy Co for an undisclosed sum earlier this month.

* Shares close 2 pct higherLONDON, Oct 12 (Reuters) - British life insurer Standard Life said an upcoming regulatory change could deliver 400,000 new members to the pension schemes it runs for corporate clients, boosting sales.The influx of new customers will be triggered by the switch in November next year to so-called auto-enrolment, under which employers will automatically sign staff up to a corporate pension plan, Standard Life Managing Director Stephen Ingledew said in a presentation to analysts on Wednesday.Standard Life, Britain’s fifth-biggest insurer, runs about 35,000 corporate pensions schemes which currently attract just 55 percent of their total potential members, Ingledew said.Standard Life shares closed 2 percent higher at 212.75 pence, lagging at 3 percent rise in the Stoxx 600 European share index .”The group is very well placed for the structural changes taking place in the UK market and we think this will become clear in 2012,” analysts at JP Morgan Cazenove wrote in a note.”Overall we stick with our view that Standard Life will be the winner from auto-enrolment.”Standard Life finance chief Jackie Hunt reiterated that a programme of technology investment aimed at preparing the group for auto-enrolment and other regulatory changes would cost about 200 million pounds ($315.5 million) this year, falling to about 180 million pounds in 2012.Standard Life said in August that the investment contributed to a bigger than expected increase in its first-half profit, soothing investors who had criticised the company for failing to spell out when the spending would yield results.