Spotify is the reason why I don't pirate music anymore. I say this as someone who used to be involved in the scene (low level FXP couriering in the late 90s and early 00s) and has gigs of release from the RNS, EGO, etc days. It's much faster and convenient to use Spotify.
I also think they cracked music discovery. Their discovery weekly playlist is stellar.
My only wish is they'd get off Electron (EDIT Chromium - thanks jjgod) and go native. A music player is a frequently enough used piece of software to optimize for performance.
also think they cracked music discovery. Their discovery weekly playlist is stellar.
Love Spotify, disagree strongly with this. My experience is terrible music that doesn't seem to have anything to do with any of the hundreds of songs I have on my playlist. I get this curious Millennial mix of soft rock music with long, boring instrumental guitar strumming, a disco beat and a sleepy, sarcastic-voiced gal (sometimes guy).
It might be because I live in Brooklyn.
And there's no Like or Dislike button like (beloved) Pandora.
Agreed. Spotify Discovery is hardly as good as many people tout it to be. Usually Indie music junk that isn't really my genre.
Also agree that Pandora is far superior when it comes to curating tracks. A trick I've learned from a friend is to never like a song Pandora; only dislike what you don't want to hear.
Spotify Radio is terrible as well. There's no good way to reseed a radio station. For example, when I first started using Spotify radio, I was listening to The National a lot. For whatever reason, 3-4 years since, whenever I start my 'Liked From Radio' station, it plays The National every fifth song or so. Ugghhh!!!
Finally, Spotify on Android has been kinda buggy for me. Once you have a lot of offline music on your device, the app takes forever to load on startup. It complains if there is no active internet connection, etc. When I wrote to Support, they suggested that I clear the cache and re-install the app (which caused me to lose all my prior downloaded music).
When I first started listening to Spotify (about a year and a half ago), I found the dicovery really high-quality, but it just seems to have gotten worse and worse. Discover Weekly is particularly bad. I find that the first 5 or so songs are okay, but from there is rapidly decends into madness.
I have the weird habit (though I'm weening off) of keeping all the music I listen to out of curiosity on a big playlist together, whether I liked it or not, as a way of keeping track. I thought that might be throwing Spotify's algorithm off (and it probably still is), but it seems it's definitely not the only reason.
I've decided to just trust that Last.fm is doing it's juob and not add any more to that playlist.
Discover Weekly looks at the music you listened to recently. If you listen to 5 random songs this week because you were very busy, it's going to offer you the same thing next Monday. Then if the only things you listen to next week is the bad offering from Discover, it's going to propose you the same crap the week after.
I love the daily mixes, though thats mostly just sorting the music I normally listen to into genres. I still find it kinda cool. Especially that I always get a mix with my kids' tastes, since I often play music for them.
I agree with the GP about Discover Weekly; it works great for me but I'm guessing maybe that's because I have a lot of saved playlists I've accreted over the years.
I disagree about the native app, though. PWDs are where it's at now. Native apps are doomed.* I didn't even download it on my new MBP, it was slow and buggy. The web version is good enough for me, combined with web-scrobbler for Chrome so I can still scrobble to Last.fm.
Discover Weekly works great for me, but I have 10,000 songs in my library. (Exactly 10,000 songs, because that’s the very annoying hard limit Spotify has set.)
Same for me. My Discover weekly started including Dutch rap music (I don't speak Dutch nor did I ever listen to that genre) and the percentage has been increasing ever since. It's now at 30-40% of my playlist. No idea how to get it off there again.
There may be some odd connection made internally, between fans of some specific genres and Dutch rap, and you were unlucky enough to be hit by it.
I get why Spotify doesn't want to expose the connections their algorithms make (because that's their biggest competitive advantage), but it would be nice to dig through once in a while, to see the connections they've made.
A very broad mix. I think it's reinforcement. A few songs slipped on their by some connection, which is fine. Because I listen to Discover weekly, it'll then register that I listen to songs of that genre and add more of those.
It appears to me that they include Discover weekly consumption in determining preferences. Any personalised Spotify playlist should be excluded to avoid this kind of reinforcement.
I suspect the same. If you accidentally listen to initial terrible playlist of stuff they want you to discover, the AI will register you as confirming you love that genre for the rest of your life.
You can actually like/dislike stuff from the app. Expand the playback notification and you'll find the buttons there. Of course this only works for currently playing songs.
Like Tinder, I really don't understand how these services -- where the magic isn't in the app so much as in the service -- who have big piles of money don't have much much better apps. It really feels like something you should be able to throw money at.
I think Apple users get the bulk of attention with regards to that. I noticed the Apple version of the same companies' apps are tighter and less bug-free. I'm on Android.
I've found more recently that the discovery playlist that I also loved is churning up more and more of the same stuff now. Not even a good mix of songs from artists I definitely like - just a very small set of songs from them.
I do love it though, generally speaking although being a heavy daily user I'm not sure the discovery part is actually as good as it initially appears.
I agree with you about discover weekly not being very good.
On the other hand what I do like is the playlist radio that comes on after you finish listening to a playlist. I find that a great way to find new music and new artists.
I think Discovery is good, but only at first, same with the Daily Mix / Radio / autoplay-after-finishing-album features, which for me seem to be a lot of "more of the same" or a lot of "generic blargh". Mind you I've probably already exhausted what I like by now. I should probably cancel my sub for a while and see if Apple Music is any better or at least gives me something fresh.
I don't pirate music anymore for the same reason. However, I also don't listen to music as I used to. I usually use Spotify to listen to what I already know, not so much to find new stuff. Before, I used to dive in depth into an artist/band, starting from their greatest hits. Once I got the band vocabulary, I'd download the albums chronologically and listened to every track, sometimes more than once until I got familiar with it. Now I don't do it with as much scrutiny, which is interesting since Spotify has all albums very well organized and even the discovery playlist. It would be much easier and better.
Is IKEA effect at play? Without Spotify, I would only start another artist when I finished the current one. So, with Spotify it becomes an information management problem due to the large amount of albums available at a click. Or it could just be that my life has changed and I don't have a time slot dedicated to music anymore.
I'm facing a very similar problem. Same story as you, I would buy MP3 or pirate if they weren't easily made available. But the amount of research I would put in the music I was listening to was enormous, making me proud of my collection.
I was able to recognise any song in my collection in less than 5 seconds, give you the artist, how I discovered it and potentially an anecdote about them.
Now I have playlists full of stuff I know nothing about. It definitively solved the music distribution issue, but I have trouble to be emotionally attached to the music I discover on Spotify.
I think your theory about the IKEA effect is probably spot(ify) on
It's an interesting phenomenon that you'll no doubt recognise. I first came across while doing an online behavioural economics course. Wikipedia has a good article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect
Really? My only experience with Discover Weekly (and any other suggestion algorithms, i.e. radios, etc...) has been pretty terrible... It doesn't seem to suggest songs I like at all, and recently it seized upon one single song in one of my playlist and only plays covers of that song and the other songs in the album for my discover weekly for the past several weeks...
I love Spotify, but I use Pandora sometimes _exclusively_ for music discovery, and then add to my Spotify.
I posted this earlier but it got buried: I had the same experience as you and built JQBX[1] to mix it up. It's kind of like Pandora (it's a lot like turntable.fm if you ever used that) but it's user generated so you tend to get more obscure / timely recommendations.
Is there anything close to replacing grooveshark? I loved the coding station, plug.dj that tried to replace that was just some guy playing tons of video game themes
We love JQBX at my office. Much more friendly than our earlier solution to pass around the line in cable between everyone’s computers all day! Great work
This is my experience with Discover Weekly as well. Everyone seems to be really divided on how well their algorithms work, they either work really well or terribly. I think it's because the quality of signals their algorithm can key off of is so limited due to it being such a passive medium.
There's no way to know if I listened to that track in full because I liked it or because I had it on in the background while doing other work and it wasn't distracting enough (usually the latter is the case for me). Furthermore if I skip a track they don't know if I skipped it because I didn't like it or I wasn't in the mood for that style of music, or I was just sick of that song cause I've heard it enough in the past X listens.
There's no way to easily signal to spotify why I'm taking an action, and yet their algorithms are trying to make assumptions over every little action.
That may be why my recommendations seem to work so well, unlike a lot of other commenters on this article.
For posterity, I have a little under 1000 tracks saved from 200 or so artists (of which I am following around half), around 50 favorite album playlists and about as many "I should give this album a listen" playlists.
So not really a huge collection in absolute terms. It is very much focused on hard rock and metal, though.
I think part of the online music discovery problem is that there is zero social context for it. Using Spotify to discover new music is, at least for me, the media equivalent of eating in a restaurant alone. Sure it's doable, and it's even preferable sometimes, but you're still missing one of the core elements of the experience.
I think that that's a nice idea, but in reality, my experience is that even people who like similar interests can vary _wildly_ in music choice... I think that social discovery of music just leads to less crystallization of tastes and more people liking a "mainstream" song instead of music choices that actually interest them...
That's why I prefer 8tracks for music discovery. User generated play lists still give me a much better results than algorithms. I don't always want something that matches what I already like but instead new stuff that compliments it.
Anecdotal but mine have been pretty great. Of course there are songs that I'm not a fan of but for the most part its recommendations have been spot on.
Same story with pirating. I had gigs upon gigs of original rips uploaded to what.cd back before it shut down and a dedicated (in-house!) seedbox with a couple of terabytes of music on it. Even before the shutdown I'd gone pretty inactive due to Spotify.
I miss the forums, IRC rooms, and insane collection of obscure music though. Not sure that will ever be totally recreated.
> My only wish is they'd get off Electron (EDIT Chromium - thanks jjgod) and go native. A music player is a frequently enough used piece of software to optimize for performance.
I agree, but I also think it's probably the main reason we have a semi-official Spotify client on linux.
My discover weekly playlist ALWAYS contains at least one song in Portoguese and at least two in German. I speak neither of those languages, and I've never willingly searched and played songs in those languages (except for "99 Luftballons" once).
I also get some terrible variation of "Here comes the sun" at least once a month despite not listening to The Beatles at all. [0] is the one that I hate the most.
Spotify, please sthap. I can't take any more Portoguese, German, and "Here comes the sun" cover songs.
You may have had an auth token compromised.
I used a dodgy third party Spotify Connect for Raspberry Pi library and had the same issue. Changing my password and expiring all current auth tokens returned my Discover Weekly back to normal after a month
So is there some library author out there, stealing people's auth tokens and playing German and Portuguese songs on our accounts, cackling to herself with glee, and waiting until we discover (today might be the day!) her utterly-harmless mischief?
As much as I love the notion, I have to conclude that Discover Weekly's mediocrity is just another piece of evidence that the world actually did end in 2012, and ever since, we've been living in a simulation. A simulation where the level of petty annoyance is carefully adjusted to a maximum, remaining ever so slightly within the bounds of believability. (In November 2016, someone spilled coffee on the controls.)
Also explains why Swiftkey (keyboard app) stopped working around that time. They say it's their new deep learning framework that provides superior feedback, I find it pretty useless compared to the old version.
I once played a Mulatu Astatke album on a friend's Spotify account during a social gathering at his house, and he complained his discover weekly playlist was mostly African music for the next couple of months.
The discover weekly algorithm seems to latch on to outliers, I guess.
I have this feature on my Android. The thumbs up and down appear to the left and right of the big Play button on the Now Playing screen, only while you're listening to Spotify playlist/album radio.
iTunes takes Gigabytes of memory and takes seconds to spin up. I have no idea why a native music app developed for their own platform can be such a piece of stinking garbage. Get your shit together Apple!
While I find the Discovery Weekly (and other editorial features like Genre collections) fantastic personally, I think the thing that keeps me from making Spotify my end-all-be-all music solution is licensing.
There are plenty of songs which I've added to playlists, only to find a year or two later are no longer available due to expired licenses. Some of my favorite artists and labels - Drag City is a big one - aren't available on Spotify at all (usually due to objections to the royalty structure). Many live albums, and more obscure and vintage releases are often nigh-impossible to find, or only have one or two songs from the album: likely those that have been licensed previously for use on TV etc.
Spotify is great, but it will forever be fighting the friction of music licensing and fair monetization.
Yep - I think their Discover Weekly is excellent. It's introduced me to dozens and dozens of artists and tracks which I've very happily incorporated into my full playlist(s). I'm routinely impressed by what it finds.
I also like the artist and song radio options which work well for office background music.
Me too, but I'm worried about what it will mean for my music listening when Spotify goes away.
I think the last time I tried to price a single one of my playlists, it'd cost me thousands to buy the songs and that's without trying to track down FLACs.
Am I literally the only person on the planet for whom Discover Weekly is broken? I once listened to some Spanish and Japanese music, but don't listen on the regular, and ever since then, all my Discover Weekly reccs have Japanese and Spanish in them, along with some generic techno.
I've reached out to Spotify's support over Twitter and they were like keep listening to more music and it will correct itself, but so far it hasn't. :(
It would be a great feature to have your whole listening history visible, so you can go through and clean out some tracks here and there, and force a refresh of your listening profile.
I think it would be a good suggestion on their Community Ideas board, I would certainly vote for it.
I have to say, Spotify recommendations is one of their biggest weaknesses. Discover weekly was just bad and most of the discover page seems to be podcasts and non music content. Just may single data point, but after 2 years as a subscriber I paused my subscription and realized I didn’t miss it. Pandora + Amazon music turned out to be more than enough for me.
I get the Electron hate but it seems it's a two part problem.
1) Electron needs to be good about sharing memory between multiple electron processes. If I have Slack, VSCode and spotify open, then memory shouldn't be tripled.
2) Better app development. It is quite possible to make performant electron apps. Apart from the memory hit of spinning up blink, if you manage your views and JS well, both memory and CPU usage can be quite reasonable.
3) I really do like Electron apps because it's a very consistent experience, no matter the platform. Developing for Mac or Linux is not an after-thought. It's always in Parity. I can see how that is both a great user experience and makes great business sense. There is a reason why React Native is gaining so much popularity: Consistent experience, write once, deploy everywhere, much smaller and maintainable codebase.
It's also same with me. I downloaded many albums because either the prices were prohibitive to buy, or the albums weren't available here.
Spotify allowed me to listen what I want, where I want. I don't like their chromium based application, but if it's the only way that they continue developing their Linux client, I'll not whine about it.
However, nothing beats owning the albums. So if the album passes a certain value in my mind, I buy it either on CD or from iTunes for archival and listening on my proper audio system, because all the snake oil and hype aside, nothing beats warmth of a good old amplifier, a decent DAC, and some big, good speakers.
I noticed recently that the new discover weekly songs tend to sync perfectly with my walking speed. I wonder if I subconsciously leaked some bias into my training sample. BPM has to be one of the factors they are matching against.
"Their discovery weekly playlist is stellar." Disagree. Give them credit for trying but they have yet to recommend a new artist that I've liked; continued listening to.
I really want to start using a streaming service, but I listen to a lot of Japanese artists and composers (lots of anime/game soundtracks). So far I have not found any streaming service with a decent selection when it comes to the latest releases from from Japan.
I would love to hear some recommendations for streaming services that can accommodate my tastes. I'm a fairly fluent in Japanese so Japanese-native services are fine too, but I'm not aware if any exists.
What performance issues do you usually run into on the current iteration of the app? Just out of personal curiosity so I can take note next time I'm using the application.
Not who you asked, but I notice a lot of lag when I'm searching/navigating/etc in Spotify. I understand that it's fetching a lot of this data from their servers, but the UI itself is also laggy when I'm browing local files, scrolling through playlists, etc, so it's not just serverside.
Not to mention the SSD-destroying & CPU-hogging habits of the application. That being said, I still use Spotify because I really value the music discovery and algorithms... and nobody else offers a streaming service with a dark theme :)
Mostly it's millisecond lag when changing songs or opening up new playlists. I get that everything is on the cloud but maybe more aggressive caching would be helpful.
If it were any other application, I wouldn't care. But because this is the second most frequently piece of software I use (browser being first), I'd love for it to be as performant as possible.
I also think their discovery is far and away the best I've used. And their streaming platform / Spotify Connect is a really well engineered platforms IMO.
My only issue with discover weekly is how heavily it weights the music you've listened to most recently. I guess thats part of the whole weekly aspect, but I wish they would give you recommendations based on your whole listening history.
Same here. I wasn't in the scene, but I torrented a hell of a lot of music, I used to DDC a lot of stuff in the good old days of IRC and I built up a huge collection at LAN parties in the 90s and early 2000s.
Spotify provided an extremely convenient and inexpensive alternative, with the added bonus of curated playlists and automatic recommendations.
Does paying for Spotify actually help any artists meaningfully though?
I've been wondering whether paying for a Bandcamp album every so often to match the cost of Spotify, and pirating music otherwise would actually benefit artists more.
I've read that Spotify pays fractions of a cent per play, where as Bandcamp pays out quite well, better than iTunes and Google Play.
Bandcamp is good if you know what you want and they do pay out really, really well.
If you want a streaming service more like Spotify you might also check out Resonate Cooperative https://resonate.is/ which has a stream-to-own model.
Discovering new music is low cost, repeated listens double until the ninth, upon which you own the track outright. You can then download or stream that track for free.
Still ramping up but I'm excited about their prospects.
Does paying for Spotify actually help any artists meaningfully though?
No. Your monthly $10, after Spotify and the labels get their majority cut, goes by percentage to the most popular artists on the service, with absolutely no regard to which artists you have personally listened to, so if you have even remotely obscure taste you are effectively not supporting the artists at all.
Bandcamp, on the other hand, takes a 15% cut of digital downloads and 10% for physical releases/merch. If you buy an album for $10 on Bandcamp, the artist gets $8.50. If you play an album by an indie artist on Spotify 100 times, they might get $0.0002 or thereabouts¤.
¤ Not actual numbers, but the point is it is effectively zero.
Has this payout structure been conclusively documented? I mean specifically the part about obscure artists getting absolutely nothing.
I know a couple of relatively obscure bands personally, and they do get something from Spotify. It's not much, but they do get a little bit. They consider streaming more as advertising that gets their name out there and their music easily accessible, but they make most of the actual money from shows and merch.
E: Artists can see their playcount stats and payouts here: https://artists.spotify.com and as far as I know, even niche artists are paid the $0.006 per song, not just the biggest players.
E2: I am a huge fan of the Bandcamp model, though. Most of the time I find music there that isn't on Spotify, and I've also bought albums on there even though they're on Spotify as well, because I want to support the artists directly. I have completely stopped buying physical albums.
It's not as simple as I made it out to be, of course, because the music industry is a confusing and terrible thing, but the point basically stands: no one except Spotify and record label execs makes anything more than rounding errors from Spotify streaming. You need millions of plays to make minimum wage.
There used to be a FAQ entry on spotifyartists.com about royalties and the complex formulae by which they are divided amongst the various parties entitled to slices of those precious fractions of a cent, but I can't find it now.
(That's right: on a promotional site directed towards artists, aimed to encourage people to make their work available on Spotify, there is nothing anywhere about how they intend to pay you. Because honestly, they don't.)
Let's say Artist X has their music on Spotify but is currently making $0 a month. Now, for the sake of argument, let's say I spend an entire month listening to only Artist X a thousand times; I personally think it's fair in that case that whatever scraps of my Spotify fee are left for the artists should then go 100% to Artist X because they're the only ones I've listened to. So, in this utopian scenario, they might make $5.
With the current model, if I do that, Artist X gets paid near zero. So you can see how the models are indeed different.
Getting 100% of your subscription is the same thing as getting 1% from everyone out of 100 customers, where only one person (you) listen to that artist (and exclusively).
That 99% of "your" money went to an artist you dislike doesn't matter if 1% of everyone else's money went to the artist you do like. The money doesn't know where it came from, and the artist doesn't care. Only the aggregate distribution matters.
Now I don't know how they do their reward distribution, I'm merely pointing out the flaw in your reasoning.
But no one actually does that, and if you really did, you don't need Spotify, just buy their album directly.
Such a payout seems appealing in theory, but in practice will just give more money to the very popular bands since they dominate the market and leave a much smaller share for the others.
in practice will just give more money to the very popular bands since they dominate the market and leave a much smaller share for the others.
Which is exactly the current situation, by the way. Anyway, what I was doing was just demonstrating that the system is not the same.
Although I am admittedly bad at maths and statistics, it seems to me that the system I am proposing would be more likely to pay out at least coffee change to small-time artists. I might be wrong, though.
Basically I think it's unfair and unintuitive how everything I pay goes to artists I don't listen to. There has to be a better system.
No, I meant it would give more money than it does now. Smaller artists are REALLY small compared to any others.
The main problem that small artists have is exposure and bad contracts anyway, and none of those can be fixed by changing the payment system.
Agree services like this defeated music piracy. However since we're talking about the IPO, Spotify faces major competition from Apple Music. Unlike Spotify, Apple does not need to turn a profit on the service.
(They've even implemented a solid weekly "new music mix" discovery service... and the apps are native.)
Their coverage of indie labels and the dance music underground still sucks. Plus I don't think their streaming is lossless and you can easily spot the difference with something as simple as a pair of $100 wireless headphones (NOT beats) hooked up to a $100 USB headphone amp.
Fun fact: bluetooth audio is not lossless (best case is 264kbps AAC, which is unlikely to be better than Spotify's 320 kbps Vorbis), so that's pretty much a moot point.
Their streaming is not lossless. There are also two different quality levels for streaming that you can choose in settings, ensure you've selected high quality, I'm not sure what the default is.
Upon saying that, even with my Sennheiser HD 202s and Macbook built-in audio I can tell the difference between Spotify and lossless FLAC. My Australian internet is so bad that I probably couldn't even stream FLAC anyway.
It's not lossless, you're right. I'm an audiophile too (E10K driving DT770s) and I've never done any A/B testing between a Spotify track and a FLAC equivalent. I'm curious how much the difference is.
Be careful that it may be hard to match levels 100%, and it's hard to do a blind test with audio coming from two different applications.
There may also be mastering differences between different versions of an album.
So the best thing is actually to do your own Ogg Vorbis encodes of a lossless album you have, and do the a/b testing on those files instead, so you're certain of the provenance.
It's really easy to spot with classical music (muddy bass and treble) or tracks with really shimmery high-end (like lots of hats and cymbals). Basically anything that stresses the encoder
Not only has Spotify stopped me pirating music, it has led to me spending thousands of pounds (previously zero) on live music to see artists I had never heard of prior to Spotify, to listen to music I never would have known existed.
The client was native (qt) a few years back. I used a very old celeron laptop back then as a dedicated Spotify station, and after they switched to this chromium bs the machine just couldn't handle it anymore.
By far the most interesting part of this is that they are doing a direct listing. There is no IPO underwriter (the bankers that the HN audience loves to bash). The shares will just start trading, pricing should be fun to watch.
Update: This nugget from the F-1 [1] alludes to the interesting to watch pricing
> Moreover, prior to the opening trade, there will not be a price at which underwriters initially sold ordinary shares to the public as there would be in an underwritten initial public offering. This lack of an initial public offering price could impact the range of buy and sell orders collected by the NYSE from various broker-dealers. Consequently, the public price of our ordinary shares may be more volatile than in an underwritten initial public offering and could, upon listing on the NYSE, decline significantly and rapidly.
Matt Levine has written about the Spotify direct listing in a few of his Money Stuff columns. Overall he seems to think it will be a really interesting experiment given that no one is sure how it will play out. Another point he makes is that Spotify is still paying investment bankers a bunch of money despite the fact that it is not IPO-ing. Even when you try to avoid paying bankers a bunch of money by skipping the IPO, you end up paying bankers a bunch of money...
Per a WSJ article in January, Spotify has retained investment bankers (reportedly paying them $30MM) to help ascertain interest from large institutional investors, tell the investment story, et cetera. Given that, I imagine that they will advise the company and its pre-IPO shareholders on an indicative price or price range.
Also, I would be hard pressed to imagine that they would not nominate a stabilization agent to help deal with the issues that you noted so that they manage price volatility in initial trading.
> As this listing is taking place via a novel process that is not an underwritten initial public offering, there will be no book building process and no price at which underwriters initially sold shares to the public to help inform efficient price discovery with respect to the opening trades on the NYSE. Pursuant to NYSE Rules, we have engaged Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC (“Morgan Stanley”) as a financial advisor to be available to consult with the designated market maker (the “DMM”) in setting the opening public price of our ordinary shares on the NYSE.
Morgan Stanley will be involved to help set the price with the market maker (sounds normal), but:
> However, because Morgan Stanley will not have engaged in a book building process, they will not be able to provide input to the DMM that is based on or informed by that process. Moreover, prior to the opening trade, there will not be a price at which underwriters initially sold ordinary shares to the public as there would be in an underwritten initial public offering.
So they didn't get hired to do a road show and won't have interest from institutional investors. As for having a stabilization agent? It sure doesn't sound like it:
> This lack of an initial public offering price could impact the range of buy and sell orders collected by the NYSE from various broker-dealers. Consequently, the public price of our ordinary shares may be more volatile than in an underwritten initial public offering and could, upon listing on the NYSE, decline significantly and rapidly.
Interesting, thanks - I did not have a chance to read through the full F-1 yet when I wrote the below, so apologies for the incorrect statement on my part regarding the stabilization agent and roadshow given the limited scope of engagement that bankers have on this listing.
At the risk of turning into r/wallstreetbets here. My bias is to the downside. Driven by a cacophany of pundits on CNBC post-IPO with negative outlooks. "There is absolutely no money to be made in streaming music on the internet" and "apple isn't into music for the profits" and so on ad infinitum. As well as significant short interest in the options market.
$SNAP is probably as nearest neighbor as any for price-action historical context.
Market timing (H1 2019) may also be ill-favored generally for anything tech related if we see significant correction.
But I certainly hope I'm wrong. And will be looking to add positions in Spotify, Dropbox, Uber, Lyft, Docker, Snowflake, AirBnB, SpaceX, WeWork, Stripe etc if and when they become available ;)
I think taking either side of this bet would be foolish. You can usually (but not always!) bet on a Day 1 bump for a normal IPO, but there's no historical data for a direct listing of this size, and Spotify might overprice it just because, hey, why not, they get more money and without underwriters the strong incentive to underprice disappears.
If you're not working for a huge bank, stay away from this until it stabilizes.
> Spotify might overprice it just because, hey, why not, they get more money and without underwriters there are no clients to disappoint
Spotify isn't pricing it, they aren't even selling shares. The initial pricing will come directly out of the order book whenever it lists. It's really unusual. Read the plan of distribution section:
> because Morgan Stanley is not acting as an underwriter, it will not have engaged in a book building process, and as a result, it will not be able to provide input to the DMM that is based on or informed by that process
You're totally right, my bad. I read it as ".. as a financial advisor to be available to consult AS the designated market maker" - thanks for pointing that out. :)
Spotify is not issuing new shares so they will not have any price to set. It's up to the "Registered Shareholders":
> The Registered Shareholders may sell their ordinary shares covered hereby pursuant to brokerage transactions on the NYSE at prevailing market prices at any time after the ordinary shares are listed for trading thereon.
Plus:
> prior to the opening trade, there will not be a price at which underwriters initially sold ordinary shares to the public as there would be in an underwritten initial public offering
I would guess that without an established price there will be a very large buy-sell spread to start that will eventually converge at a price as people lower their sell bids and raise their buy bids.
> Unlike an initial public offering, the resale by the Registered Shareholders is not being underwritten by any investment bank. The Registered Shareholders may, or may not, elect to sell their ordinary shares covered by this prospectus, as and to the extent they may determine. Such sales, if any, will be made through brokerage transactions on the New York Stock Exchange (the “NYSE”) at prevailing market prices.
So essentially early investors will be the ones [potentially] selling. The pricing should be highly volatile.
But what if NONE of the early investor wants to sell? So there are no shares afloat? Or until a ridiculously high price before they start selling?
Let say it is valued at $20B with shares at $20. What is stopping an early investors selling 1 shares at $1000, market valued at 1 Trillion, and get someone to buy that 1 shares?
My point is since there is no new shares, unless the early investor are really rushing to offload. Selling would be limited.
+1. Ability to upload music on Google Play Music is also keeping me from switching to Spotify. I have a lot of tracks that simply aren't in the Spotify catalog. If they add that, I'd switch tomorrow.
I just stopped listening to music that doesn't exist in Spotify.
I fought it for a while with local playlist syncing and such, but just wasn't worth it over time. There's enough other music out there that I gave up trying.
You should give YouTube Music a try. It has both the "regular" catalog you'd expect from Spotify (high quality audio, organised by albums, etc.) + more indy bands that publish their music on YouTube.
I hit this issue with a lot of video game/movie soundtracks (Battlestar Galactica and Starbound OSTs are some of my favorite programming music), and it's extremely frustrating. Even worse, Spotify's app doesn't work on my work VPN, forcing me to use the web app... which doesn't support listening to user tracks since Spotify won't store them in its own cloud.
I pay them $10/month for service, so why can't they reserve a couple gigs of space to store my files that they don't have in their library?
The problem is that, according to your documentation, local music has to be on a desktop (the only way to listen to local music on mobile is to be connected to the same WiFi of a desktop that serves that music (!)). Which I think defeats the purpose of having your music on the go.
You can still add local tracks to playlists and sync those playlists to your phone. I have plenty of albums that don't exist in Spotify's cloud that I bring with me on my phone as "downloaded" playlists.
Yeah this might seriously make me considering switching from my current half-baked solution of GPM and Pandora, but I still feel discovery is better on Pandora (and that's saying a lot because Pandora leaves a _lot_ to be desired).
I believe playlists don't count as library (please correct me if I'm wrong) - so you can effectively surpass the 10,000 as a limit by adding songs to playlists instead of the library.
I've actually changed my model primarily around playlists and don't actually use the library feature of spotify hardly at all.
I've been a Spotify premium user for years now and have never used my Library, but have a ton of playlists organized and nested into different genre/mood/etc directories.
I'm sure there's a good reason why people want to use their Library instead and why the "playlist" way is inefficient since I've seen a lot of users annoyed with the limit, but anecdotally I've never had a problem with the playlist-first way of using the app.
Actually at this point if they put the limits on playlists and had an unlimited Library I'd probably be jumping ship to something else myself.
I use spotify in a lazy way, but essentially if I like a song, I press the check mark. If I'm doing my normal listening I just have all of my songs that are in my library on shuffle.
I imagine if I hit the 10K limit this inability to use shuffle on ALL of my tracks at once would annoy me.
I only save my very favorite tracks, for full albums I add them as a playlist.
That way I can still shuffle my collection of favorite awesome tracks, but I also have easy access to my favorite albums, where I still consider the whole album to be good, but only a few of the tracks stand out as absolute favorites.
This is true, but IMO it's not a great replacement. I imported my old Rdio library this way and it's effectively useless. I've had to become a playlist-first user as well, but boy I miss having a browsable catalog of all "my music"...
I like google play, also converted from spotify. But I don't like that albums disappear from google play.
This happened at spotify too and I assume it's due to legal issues. When an artist released a certain album on one label and only that album disappears.
It's very annoying and is pushing me back to good old piracy.
I've experienced all of these issues before, the 10k/disappearing albums is really debilitating for music lovers who like to collect full albums. I switched to Spotify from Google Music a few months ago, and my experience is mostly the same--mediocre, but functional enough.
At least Spotify has an open API, so you (maybe) can solve your own problems given some time.
(10k is really not that much at all if you're into a few genres.)
Does anyone know the technical background of this? They talk about providing a great experience for others, so I guess it's about performance. But library entries can be partitioned by users so there should be no performance effect of 100k songs per library of one user on others? Also, the current 10k limit doesn't represent much data if stored with a bit of meta data.
I don't understand - I thought you could stream any audio from their collection that you wanted on Spotify? Do you have to add audio to your library first? Otherwise why does it matter what is in your library and what isn't if you can stream anything?
It allows you to quickly look through music you like, rather than having to manually search for the artist/album/song every single time.
It's still streamed (unless you save it for Offline, which it supports) but it's waaay better for organization. Have you ever forgetten the name of an artist or forgot an artist exists until you scroll past them in your music library?
Instead of saving full albums (which adds every single track to your saved tracks list), focus on saving your very favorite tracks, and add the full album as a playlist instead.
Ironically, I tried and failed to switch to Google Play Music because they limit playlists to 1000 songs, and I have a couple different playlists with 1600+ songs each.
10K songs is restrictive when it comes to digital music collections.
I have 15k songs in my iTunes library, and that doesn't include the music I listen to via Apple Music and SoundCloud. Given that I've been building up this music collection for about two decades now, there's quite a bit of stuff in the long tail, though I do listen to near all of it over the span of a few years.
If Spotify want to be around for another decade, I think it's reasonable that they let people build up a respectable library.
But you don't have to save every single track to your collection, there's no reason to be a hoarder. They're still there on Spotify even if you don't save them, it's not like saving MP3s to your hard drive.
Use playlists as well. Each playlist has its own limit of 10K tracks AFAIK. So I save only absolute favorite individual tracks (and take some stuff off the list once in a while), and I save favorite full albums as playlists.
if you want to have music on 10hrs a day, a 10k long playlist only lasts 20 days. and 10hrs is only half a day, and you might want to have music outside of work hours too!
Same. I'm a Spotify lifer unless something catastrophic happens to their service or media availability.
The only alternative service I even debated about was Apple Music when they first announced their streaming service, but there is no clear advantage to their service and I hate the Apple Music UI.
I hope they find a way to help a bigger % of the revenue get into the hands of artists and start cutting out the big record companies who just middleman everything. But other than that, no complaints.
I really don't want to change this discussion into a "which is the best music streaming service" debate, but I am really curious, why haven't your considered Google Play Music? Interface? Songs count? Price?
I am subbed to GPM for a few years now. I did it first because Spotify was and still isn't available in my country, but I don't think I would switch if they become available tomorrow.
I used to use GPM and am now a Spotify customer. For starters, I was annoyed that Google removed some of its playlist interface around the activity-based radios. You'd click an activity and there would be several stations/playlists for different styles of music that were great for that general activity. Loved it. Now I can't find it anywhere.
Second is the interface in general. Spotify realizes that especially on mobile, you have limited screen real estate. I really dislike Google's choice to overly emphasize giant thumbnails of album art I'll never care about or recognize, at the expense of not providing a list view for all levels of the hierarchy. This also leads to situations where artist names are truncated beyond recognition because there's only a few characters space for them.
The GPM app on my Pixel XL also takes seemingly forever to load and play, podcasts often lose their place, etc. Spotify just works.
The album art bit I'll generally agree with, but for the activity bit... not to sound too harsh, but did you even try to find it after they did a minor redesign a while back?
Menu ("..." on left in web) > Browse stations > Activities
The change occurred ages ago so I might be forgetting details, but what I think was removed was a more curated way of matching stations with the activity, with descriptions for each. Now it is just a ton of radio stations that often seem unrelated, and no upfront description of what it is unless you click through. Just more giant thumbnails I don't need.
I was using Spotify 3 years ago but it was killing the battery life on my Nexus 4 so I switched to Google Play Music (chose it because of the upload feature).
I like the service but there is many things in the UI that I don't like:
- No desktop app
- Album listing is a mess:
. It doesn't differentiate between singles and albums so the album list is sometimes very long for no reasons
. You can't mentally filter them yourselves as the number of tracks and the album's length are not displayed for each "album"
. It is somehow sorted by release year, but not entirely (you can't chose anyway).
. On mobile the year is not even displayed so if you want to quickly see if an artist has a new album or simply listen to the more recent one, you can't really be sure of what is displayed.
- On mobile the search button is not always accessible, you have to navigate / "go back"
- Features disappearing:
. You used to be able to filter new releases by genre. Now it's a general category of just popular artists.
. Same for popular tracks and albums. For my tastes this entire feature is basically useless.
- Radios: the UI used to suggest auto-generated radios based on artists you listen to, it was my favorite feature that helped me discover many great artists and songs. Somehow it got moved and it took me a long time to find it again (it's now only a link on the artist page I guess ? I never think to do that)
- Bonus nitpick : the upload feature is great, sadly your music is not available to other people on the family plan
I've really enjoyed using https://www.googleplaymusicdesktopplayer.com/ for desktop. Its just an Electron App but it seems to add a few extra features that make it much nicer to use.
hmmm honestly it is just a case of "I used spotify first". If spotify hadn't been my first choice I probably would have gravitated to GPM instead. At this point I don't want to sacrifice any more of my life to Google, so if I had to switch it would probably be to nothing.
disclaimer : I worked for a music streaming service for several years
I don't really like the Play Music UI (but I don't hate it either, the new parts are very nice, but the album pages could use a bit more love).
I dislike the spotify UI though (why is it THAT dark and depressive ?) and play music removes the ads from youtube (us user) and pays youtubers, so that's an easy choice.
Oh, the winning feature of Play Music for me is that I can add my own album, even if it does not belong to their catalog. It still shows with all it's metadata and cover as an album.
I've been a subscriber to Google Play Music for a few years, initially I think my choice rested on being able to upload from my personal library, which was more significant back in the days when there was much less parity in music service catalogs - this was circa no Beatles. Then they added the youtube tie in where you don't get youtube ads - very valuable. I agree with the general UI complaint, it isn't great. To add to the crit, the branding is weak - 'Spotify' is meaningful, 'Play' is not. Despite all that, I've decided $100/yr for music on demand and no youtube ads is a good deal for me.
I tried Spotify a couple years ago and the experience was terrible and I haven't been back. I don't recall exactly: there was tons of hype, I had to download and run an installer, then create an account and validate email, and then I could play a song, so I picked a song and got some audio ads and subsequent more ads and suggested songs that were not at all related to the song I picked. It wasn't just not good enough to get me to switch, the onboarding was repellent.
I probably won't be their customer but I'm happy to see them succeed for a variety of reasons: customers love it, they aren't FAMGA, and that slide deck on their organizational squads and tribes [1] was significant in my work life.
You listed the killer features of Google Music for me: no Youtube ads, auto-pay my favorite Youtubers, and upload my own albums.
Also the Youtube Music app.
I've found their catalog to be really complete, I've rarely not been able to find something specific I'm looking for.
Only advantage I'm hearing from Spotify music users is that the algorithmic selections sound really good. Meh, I put in about an hour a month of surfing different Play Music radio stations and recommendations. Works for me.
I don’t think it’s possible to really understand how great Spotify’s algorithm is until you’ve experienced it recommending a fantastic song, and you go check the artist out, notice they have less than ten thousand plays and have only released two songs
Idk how that’s even possible but it happens once a month for me
They use human curation for many of the pre-built playlists, but those humans are also assisted by some interesting algorithm work on the backend.
For instance, the Fresh Finds playlists - music that's good but very new or undiscovered - are made by curators who sift through songs and artists listened to each week by "tastemaker users". Spotify combs through their listener data and identifies users who have a habit of listening to music that later blows up and becomes much more popular. They tag those users anonymously and use their taste to inform the Fresh Finds playlists, which also feed the rest of the editorial department.
I read it's based on human curation - this is the clever part.
If you have songs in your playlist that someone else has in their playlist it'll find a song in that other playlist that you don't have. Offload the complexity of matching to humans already doing it.
> I dislike the spotify UI though (why is it THAT dark and depressive ?) and play music removes the ads from youtube (us user) and pays youtubers, so that's an easy choice.
I am also not a fan of Spotify's UI. I've tried in order, Spotify, GPM, and am now on AM. I may try Spotify again, since my first try was a few years ago and I didn't care for the UI and became annoyed after I built a playlist and half the songs disappeared one day (rights issue I guess).
GPM is a great deal because it also includes YouTube Red and YouTube music if that's your thing.
You can also get a deal on AM if you buy for the year for $99 and use an iTunes gift card that you can usually find for ~$80.
The AM UI is not the best, but since I'm on iOS, the integration is nice.
I was an Apple music since launch(till a month back). But once I tried Spotify and the playlists, I switched instantly. While Apple Music is a competitor, it's not everywhere like Spotify is and their recommendations are horrible. In all time using them, I discovered 2 songs that I liked. With 4 weeks on Spotify, I'm already at 25!
I've switched to an Amazon ecosystem (dot, fireTv, etc) and Spotify just works seamlessly between them all. I love it.
I have to wonder how many users Spotify picked up when Apple blew the christmas HomePod release and Amazon flushed out Alexa-enabled devices at heavy discounts.
Man, I don't know. I'm moving away from iOS/Siri/HomeKit/HomePod/iCloud(ugh) instead of moving toward it.
It might not be a lock-in, but given my track time on a non-Apple ecosystem and the value I'm getting out of Spotify compared to Apple Music...I'm not going back any time soon.
As an alternative opinion I used both Apple Music and Spotify. Apple Music’s recommendation has been amazing for me, and Spotifys terrible and I have fairly strange tastes in music (play dark-Berghein techno, but then like exploring as many genres from around the world as possible).
If Apple Music was supported in as many places as Spotify I would drop Spotify.
I'm with you on that. I've been a Spotify Premium member since day 1 of US availability, with no intention of switching to others. The only alternative I've even tried is TIDAL, through their trial, to see if the lossless quality was worth the $10 extra a month, but didn't renew beyond that.
This may be one of my first "buy and hold" stocks simply for the personal reason of loving the service.
If you contrast this with 51 -> 92 for ad supported MAUs in 3 years it seems like they have been successful in converting a lot of ad supported users to premium ones.
In Canada, one of the largest telecom companies gives new accounts to their services/Spotify free 6 months of Spotify. That may have helped boost the numbers recently.
Those offers seem to be all over the place. They're common in the US as well.
The challenge for Spotify will be the next few years, seeing how they withstand the substantial onslaught coming from Apple's music subscription service (which is booming as well). I'm skeptical Spotify can stay in the fight financially over time. There's nothing they can do in music that will ever produce the kind of profit required to support a $25 billion market cap (critical given they're about to open themselves up to public shareholder scrutiny). If they can't, the public shareholders will eventually force a sale of the company.
They'd need 250-300 million paying subscribers, most likely, to get to ~$800m in net income (~5% net income margins), assuming they can ever actually make money to begin with. That'd be a generous ~31 PE. It's essentially impossible.
Apple, Google and Amazon on the other hand, never need to earn a penny of profit in music. It'll be perpetually in their interests to hold music service margins on the floor. The music industry won't be so stupid as to harm Spotify, given they'll want the leverage vs Apple & Co? Well they successfully killed off Pandora on margin squeezing, so sure they will. Their view is there's always another company to replace the last one, and that their music rights are the value that's core and eternal.
I think about half of their 2017 net loss was due to something to do with Convertible Notes, that they're explaining on pages F-43 and F-44.
I'm trying to calculate patio11's "fundamental equation of SAAS" ( https://twitter.com/patio11/status/965985835790184448 ) for the numbers for churn, subscribers, and ARPU on pages 67 to 70ish. Will update if I actually figure it out.
Ok, here is my attempt for their premium service:
pp68, 2017 ARPU = 5.32 EUR/mo.
pp69, 2017 Churn = 5.5%/mo.
pp79, 2017 Customer Acquisition, 48 Million at end of 2016, 71 Million at end of 2017. (71 - 48) / 48 * 100% = 48%. To convert to monthly, if I just divide by 12 it is 4%/month. If I do (1.48)^(1/12) it is 3.3%. I guess this is net of churn, So their fresh acquisition I would estimate at 5.5% + 3.3% = 8.8%.
I'll leave the math as an exercise to the reader, partly because I don't know what is being summed over in the formula.
I'd be curious to know at what number of users do they break-even if their cost of revenue, sales, and marketing are linear to users and their other non-financial costs remain fixed.
For the years ended December 31, 2015, 2016, and 2017, we generated €1,940 million, €2,952 million, and €4,090 million in revenue, respectively, representing a compound annual growth rate (“CAGR”) of 45%.
For the years ended December 31, 2015, 2016, and 2017, we incurred net losses of €230 million, €539 million, and €1,235 million, respectively.
For the years ended December 31, 2015, 2016, and 2017, our EBITDA was €(205) million, €(311) million, and €(324) million, respectively.
For the years ended December 31, 2015, 2016, and 2017, our net cash flow (used in)/from operating activities was €(38) million, €101 million, and €179 million, respectively.
For the years ended December 31, 2015, 2016, and 2017, our Free Cash Flow was €(92) million, €73 million, and €109 million, respectively.
I really hope Spotify succeeds. I've mentioned this before on Hacker News, but as an artist, the algorithmic playlists are amazing. On a good week I get ~4,000 new listeners. It's incredible. Discovery Weekly drives the most but Release Radar and Radio also send a good chunk.
Apple Music on the hand hasn't even verified my artist profile— which I need in order to view analytics. So I don't even know if people listen to me there.
I've said it before, but Spotify is the single most valuable subscription service I pay for. Video streaming is convenient, but some of the music I've come across on Spotify has literally changed my life and that would never have happened if I was still forced to torrent everything. It's just so easy, it's everything they said the steaming model would be.
Wrote a "persuasive speech" in college a decade ago about how to solve the problem the music industry was facing (piracy). I proposed an all you can listen subscription service, at a price point of say $10. Saying the record labels would work together to make this happen. My professor nearly laughed me out of the room when I proposed my thesis for the speech. I presented the speech anyways and got an A.
Today, Spotify is thriving as a company and the major record labels have their hands in it. Sure, they have some work to do to figure out how to become profitable and sustainable, but they've come a long way.
Hey sorry I just saw this reply. Unfortunately, I can't find the paper, as it was written in word and pre-dates my days of using Dropbox (edit: it pre-dates Dropbox period). However, I was able to find the email thread with my professor, since Gmail is forever. I had to redact some personal information.
I use Tidal more often because it has higher quality audio most of the time and a better UI, but fall back to Spotify prn. The emphasis on original music is nice.
I subscribe to both because one is not a subset of the other, which I dislike.
But hey, it’s been great, and I’ve actually found new music I love on Spotify/Tidal, unlike every other platform which has attempted recommendations.
The default quality for the desktop app is in OGG Vorbis at 160kbps and for the mobile app is 96kbps. With a Premium subscription you can change these to 'Extreme' (320kbps). The web player reaches is 128kbps AAC or 256kbps with Premium [0]. Many users might be unaware they can change the quality at all (or they don't use the desktop app but use the web player so can't change the quality at all).
I can definitely hear the difference between 96/160/256. Between 256/320/lossless I'd probably fail an ABX test [1] and I'm very doubtful of anyone claiming to hear the differences between 320/lossless regardless of how much of an audiophile they claim to be if they refuse to take an ABX test. I'd maybe believe telling 256 and lossless apart but still be doubtful without any ABX results.
In that case given Spotify premium and just setting the config to use 'extreme' there should be no reason to pay for a separate subscription service? (At least for quality reasons).
At that point, you’re choosing between services based on content. And even without a quality issue, I have several artists I need one or the other platform to hear. I haven’t enabled the Extreme quality on Spotify (and was unaware).
I’ve compared the two, not blind, periodically. I seem to notice a bigger difference when using my higher-quality headphones and on certain albums (typically newer ones), but have not tested blind.
A confounding variable is that Spotify may use different bit rate heuristics than Tidal when streaming, so I’d need to preload the albums to be compared on both platforms, but I’m willing to conduct it blind.
A bigger complaint for me, honestly, is that Spotify’s navigation does not do what I want it to. (e.g., when trying to go to an artist’s page from a song, it just won’t do what I want.)
I spent several months alternating between Tidal HIFI and Spotify to see if I could difference on my Sennheiser HD800S and the Chord Mojo DAC and couldn't. I also tried the "Tidal Masters". It wasn't some complex blind test though.
In the end, Spotify's content discovery was worth more to me, but if they finally release some lossless version for twice the price, I'll be happy to subscribe. Even at that price, one month of Spotify is stil cheaper than the first R.E.M CD I bought in 1991.
I've experienced a significant improvement listening to Tidal Masters tracks over Spotify. A very enjoyable improvement. Even non-Masters tracks on Tidal sound significantly better. Currently, almost all tracks on Tidal at the HiFi tier are 1411kbps (non-Masters) and still the Spotify desktop app caps out at 320kbps.
Spotify has been streaming 1411kbps for most tracks through their browser player in Chrome and only then I notice little difference between Spotify and Tidal HiFi. The Masters tracks still are noticeably better than the Spotify on Chrome app playing at 1411kbps.
There is an upside to streaming from the Spotify Chrome app for 1411kbps which doesn't incur extra cost but this is all functionality Spotify is not advertising. The downsides are this only currently works in the US (IIRC) and navigation in the Chrome Browser app is very limited compared to the desktop app.
I'm very surprised you were not able to notice a difference with such a great stack as the HD800s + Mojo and suspect it was something else in the chain limiting the potential. I suggest giving even just Spotify direct in the Chrome webapp a try again if not Tidal and ensure you have the chain configured properly.
>Currently, almost all tracks on Tidal at the HiFi tier are 1411kbps (non-Masters) and still the Spotify desktop app caps out at 320kbps.
You cannot compare bitrates directly like that.
1411.2kbps is uncompressed CD audio, while the 320kbps is a highly developed and advanced psychoacoustic format that aims to be completely equivalent to CD quality to the human ear.
So it's not "getting less than 1/4th of the music", like some audiophiles claim, based on faulty or non-existent understanding of audio codecs.
Also, you are absolutely not getting 1411.2kbps from the Spotify Chrome app. That is simply a display issue, or the actual decoding happening at another step in the chain, and it's either giving you Ogg Vorbis at 320kbps or AAC at 256kbps.
spotify premium (if you select “high quality streaming” in settings) uses 320 kb/s ogg vorbis, whereas tidal streams in a lossless format. on most audio set ups those will be indistinguishable but my understanding is that people who know what to listen for can tell the difference on a suitably powerful/nuanced sound system.
>but my understanding is that people who know what to listen for can tell the difference on a suitably powerful/nuanced sound system.
Or at least they claim they can. I've yet to know anyone with any expensive systems who claims to be an audiophile who can actually pass an ABX test with any more accuracy than random guessing would have given them. Largely because they'd need superhuman hearing - able to hear things that are literally outside the frequency of normal human hearing. Not saying these people can't exist... just that it's extremely unlikely.
They pay around $0.006 per play. If you're only getting 1000 plays or less per months, that's not very much, but it's the exact same rate as paid to bigger acts.
But yes, absolutely buy merch and go to shows, and support artists through Patreon. For the sheer amount of enjoyment these people give people, I think most can afford to support their favorite artists a little extra.
I am a Soundcloud Go+ (or whatever their premium tier is called by now) subscriber, and it is the worst. They don't have the same catalogue available like Spotify, the alogrithm constantly shows me outright garbage (young aspiring musicians? More like 15 year olds with a mic in the basement) and their app... I don't know how a company that old can have an Android app that is so shitty. It even misses the subscription status and won't let me play my collection, even when 2 minutes earlier (and later) it all worked (works) fine.
Can't wait to end my subscription there and move to Spotify/Apple Music.
Youtube is like listening to music through an aquarium. The audio quality is terrible.
Sure, there are a lot of unknown/aspiring/indie artists on Youtube and nowhere else, some of them are even quite talented, but if I can find audio literally anywhere else, I will use that instead.
It depends completely on how good the uploaded tracks are. Youtube uses Opus at a rather high bitrate, so there shouldn't even be any audible issues from re-encoding.
I've had Spotify before and switched to Apple Music because of the student pricing. When I had Spotify, I would discover new music and new artists all the time. Since getting Apple Music, I really haven't discovered anyone new.
Although I've graduated, Apple seems to think I'm still in school and is still only charging me $5/month. The moment that ends, I'm switching to Spotify. Also, the Apple Music app on iOS is horrible. Spotify's app is so much better.
You might have already known this but Spotify had the same $5/mo student discount but they may be more diligent about checking your enrollment. Def loved the 5 dollar plan :)
I used Spotify until I realized that it was suggesting to me the exact same songs that my friends were listening too. So if I wanted to branch out and try something new, it became a chore. Also, I do enjoy the occasional 1970s rock song, which Spotify has been lacking in.
With Apple Music and human curators, I can actually find new music better. And I can get my rock fix when I need it.
I know Spotify has a similar student deal but for whatever reason I went with AM and now that I've graduated I've just kind of stuck with it since they still charge me the student rate.
Apple Music is incredibly awful at music discovery, and even fairly bad when it comes to just showing me music I might be interested based on what I've listened to. For example I might listen to one song somewhere without necessarily liking the genre of it, and then AM repeatedly shows me music for that genre. Not very intelligent.
The only annoying issue I have with IOS Spotify is that it caches your playlists until ??? or the application gets restarted. I frequently add songs to my library at work, but find that the songs don't show up on my phone when leaving for the day.
Just to provide an opposite case: tried Spotify, did not click with me. Happy with the Apple music now (and iTunes Match).
Never understood the complaints about the music app.
On the other side of this, I love how easy it is to find new music on Spotify! Every week, the "Discover Weekly" playlist nets me at least one or two new artists I end up loving.
If you ever get tired of Discover Weekly give JQBX[1] a try. I built it so that I could bust out of the same old genres Spotify tends to re-suggest every week.
This is neat! It's cool how powerful Spotify's API is.
I built Amplitude [1], which uses Spotify's recommendations API to create artist based discovery playlists, if you need more new music than Discover Weekly provides and also Rediscover [2], to save your discover weekly playlists so you don't lose songs.
This looks great, I'm definitely going to give it a try. Spotify has been slowly driving me crazy with the same exact songs in my daily mixes day after day just reshuffling.
This is the big reason why I switched to Apple Music. Spotify has an amazing UI/UX, but it doesn't change the fact that I don't want to listen to the same stuff each week. I have FM radio for that.
Jason, this is amazing! Every few years I look for something that will be able to suggest new/different music to listen to, and the product gets killed.
Spotify used to have apps which had something like this (... I forget the name of the app), it's good to have a replacement.
I would happily pay $1 a month for this. Where is the $12 a year subscription?
I've found I almost exclusively listen to "Discover Weekly" and "Release Radar" during my commutes, and every now and then grab a song for some playlists for other times.
I do wish there were better ways to shape what songs end up in there as sometimes it can be a bit of a miss.
Even I hope so. Discover Weekly and their curated playlists are some of the best I have seen across all music services. Even their cross platform support is the best. Play Music has a terrible app and web UI. Even Apple Music doesn't fare any better.
Even if it's based on Electron, their Linux desktop client at least exists and this is reason enough for me to keep being a subscriber. The web player is working but is missing features and has some major bugs (e.g., I cannot "dislike" a song on a playlist). My one wish would be for it to get on the same level of playlist management that Amarok, Foobar2000 and similar music players were on like 15 years ago...
Amazon Music's desktop client, despite also being Electron-based, is only available on Windows and Mac and its usability is so bad, I cannot even describe it. There is a reason why Amazon Music is a lot cheaper: it's worse in every metric beside costs that I were evaluating.
Since when is Spotify a Electron application? I recall it having the UI made with JavaScript, HTML and CSS but all the rest is handled with C++. Think they were using Chromium Embedded Framework.
Google Play Music is the best deal out there - ad-free Youtube TV is bundled in the plan and allows you to upload your own music that you can stream from anywhere. That said, it's the absolute worst in terms of UI and cross platform support. I kept switching between subscriptions because Spotify still doesn't allow uploads (which I really need). But gave up on everyone and decided to just sync my personal music to my phone and use Spotify. The Discover Weekly and other playlists combined with a really solid cross-platform support I'm not moving to anything else. I have a windows computer, an xbox one, iPhone, Alexa, a Macbook and chromecast and Spotify works on every one of them. No one's ever going to beat that.
That said, I'd very skeptical of investing in Spotify. Apple Music has a real chance of becoming the default service everyone subscribes to on their iPhone without thinking twice. Apple Music just have to be good enough.
Google play all access comes with Youtube Red, which is YouTube without ads. YouTube TV is a different product, which still has ads since it's just delivering TV channels over internet.
What kind of phone do people have in emerging countries? Certainly not an Apple one.
I wouldn't worry about Apple too much, the market will become saturated in some countries after some years where they are popular. But in other countries, where they only use Android, who do you think will win the market?
Glad to hear Discover Weekly works out that way for you as an artist.
As a listener, I'm quite happy about it too. Sure, a lof of there is a bit meh to me, but I've easily discovered 50 new artists that I like a reasonable lot through that channel.
Discovery. That's what I loved about last.fm in the olden days, as a listener. My scrobbler profile is still a bit extreme in the sheer amount of artists and music I listen to.
Yet I never moved on to Spotify, rather started browsing and buying on bandcamp (who have a great weekly podcast, just enough for me).
I constantly listen to Discover Weekly on an almost daily basis and always find some great songs that I otherwise would never have found. Spotify is THE service I would never want to be without.
I enjoy Spotify so much that Apple's weird hard ball with Spotify is making me less interested in their products.
I actually think the Apple Watch is a pretty interesting product and I'm a bit interested in buying one, but the lack of Spotify support has turned me off the idea for the time being.
If you do not mind me asking, as a fellow artist, how have you reached the point of getting this regular influx of listeners on Spotify? Through external promotion or is this solely driven by the Spotify platform and its algorithms?
Maybe not directly, but it does gain him new fans, which means more people show up at shows, which means he can get booked for bigger shows and sell more merch.
Yes, I see this argument everywhere, but I really don't like the idea of artists earning their money with cheap merchandise instead of the product itself: The music. The album should be the good to sell, not some unnecessary accessoires.
And remember that not every project is a rock band. Think of an ambient, experimental artist creating calm music for home listening and an adult audience - those artists won't fill any venues or impress their listeners with colorful t-shirts. They rely on album sales.
The vast majority of money-earning musicians don't earn anything significant from album sales, they have to rely on live gigs and merchandise sales. This shouldn't come as a surprise.
And a lot of musicians don't make anything, or are actually losing money. But they keep doing it for the love of the art.
Would I like to see these talented individuals properly compensated? Hell yes! But between predatory record labels and the sheer vast number of people out there also producing music, it's not easy to break through.
A key metric not mentioned in the comments is premium average revenue per user (ARPU). It's consistently decreasing over the last 3 years:
2015: € 6.84
2016: € 6.20 (9% decline)
2017: € 5.32 (14% decline)
Also, the number of hours consumed per MAU as of December of each year is also increasing. I should have taken the average over the year for both but I am interested in the trend.
2015: 191 hours per year (17.4 billion/91 million)
2016: 217 hours per year (26.7 billion/123 million)
2017: 253 hours per year (40.3 billion/159 million)
This probably just means that more people are using family plans instead of paying individually. I'm part of a family plan, as are pretty my everyone else I know. It only makes sense. The upside is that canceling a family plan is much harder than a single one just due to the increased number of people involved who'll be inconvenienced.
It may also mean that they’ve expanded the user base in countries that have lower purchasing power than western europe, and thus probably lower pricing. That’s surely a good thing?
I live in Thailand, and got an advertised promotion for Spotify premium for less than half a dollar for three months total. Credit card usage and online payments here are pretty low though, so that will surely lower the speed of adaptation.
Probably not very hard. The biggest headache is probably that the recurring credit card purchases might be flagged and blocked for being an unrecognized international transaction. But then again, $1.50 won't raise alarms for many banks.
Don't they know the country where the card was issued? I.e. Spotify could refuse payment using non-LA card? Or, ideally, just bump it to the higher bracket (with appropriate notice).
Playlists are completely different. Already had this within Europe, if you like music in a country you should sign up for Spotify in that country. Music availability can also differ.
So could be possible if you like music commonly listened to in Latin America and don't use Spotify's playlists. Otherwise I'd pay more to stay with the service of your home country.
A brilliant CEO in Elk and an unfortunate industry. It will be interesting to see how they face marginalization. The risk factors of Apple being able to retain 100% of their revenue while Spotify being forced to give away 30% back to Apple is kind of sad. It really does feel like there's continuously diminishing opportunities for companies to get in front of consumers without facing some sort of platform tax.
Spotify stopped using in-app subscriptions in their iOS app. I'd love to see the numbers comparing user growth rate vs cost caused by the in-app subscriptions, that led them to their decision.
spotify premium is $10. it used to be if you subscribed to spotify premium through the app store it cost $13 because Apple literally wants 30% of any money that changes hands through the app store. otherwise you give spotify $10 directly and go on your way.
> No public market for our ordinary shares currently exists. However, our ordinary shares have a history of trading in private transactions. Based on information available to us, the low and high sales price per ordinary share for such private transactions during the year ended December 31, 2017 was $37.50 and $125.00, respectively, and during the period from January 1, 2018 through February 22, 2018 was $90.00 and $132.50, respectively, in each case excluding the Tencent Transactions (as defined herein).
> As of February 22, 2018, we had 176,976,280 ordinary shares outstanding. Except as otherwise indicated, the number of ordinary shares outstanding excludes (i) 14,095,254 ordinary shares issuable upon exercise of stock options outstanding as of February 22, 2018 at a weighted-average exercise price of $49.02 per ordinary share, (ii) 191,985 ordinary shares issuable upon the settlement of restricted stock units (“RSUs”) outstanding as of February 22, 2018, and (iii) 6,720,000 ordinary shares issuable upon the exercise of warrants outstanding as of February 22, 2018, at a weighted average exercise price of $59.92 per ordinary share.
So their private valuation is somewhere between $15B and $23B?
Another avid Bandcamp user reporting in. Streaming isn't an option at all - there's just too much music missing, or it might be missing someday. However I maintain a very large collection of music with lots of obscure and rare music, which is very different from most listeners, which are, frankly, very well served by Spotify - for a very cheap price. Too cheap. Nobody is earning any money from streaming.
I couldn't imagine renting my music and I don't think it's a working business model for anyone but Apple, Google & Co., who can handle a loss.
I discovered them recently. The model appears to be (paraphrasing) 'give us non-exclusive world-wide rights to distribute your music freely, and we'll work on ways to monetise later'.
Of note: high-profile artists Wyclef Jean and Bonobo appear to have signed up.
But 90% of my listening time is spotify, because I no longer really keep a personal library outside of spotify.
I download files off bandcamp, and upload them to spotify
and Music-map.com (gnoosic) is amazing. I didn't think it was AI though? I thought it was just simple: if you like this, other people who liked this, liked that.
I wonder if Spotify will become a music label for the same reasons that Netflix has been making their own shows? Spotify could be severely damaged if only a few labels were to pull their content.
Well, not exactly. I don't have Netflix exactly because of that: not all major producers are on Netflix. That's the same as a major producer pulling something from Spotify.
There's no point if I'm still going to have to pirate half the stuff I watch or listen to, or pay twice for a subscription. (If you can subscribe in the first place, that is; last I heard one couldn't even watch game of thrones legally in the Netherlands if I wanted to.)
Well, and it also doesn't help that I've heard you need to unroot your android device (I will not be an unprivileged user on my own hardware) and enable DRM in firefox to watch Netflix. But the main reason is that every time I check, they don't have at around a third of what I would want to watch.
Spotify is absolutely affordable especially there's a family plan and a student plan. I also stop pirating music (well I do work for a music company but that's not even a factor at all) because of Spotify.
I remember reading how Spotify charges ~equal to Netflix, and their expenses will likely be much lower due to not needing to fund 'originals' and all.
While Netflix's originals also offer a distinct advantage over their competitors and increases the cost of switching, Spotify will likely have a very profitable future as a company, and I'm curious to see if their market cap will ever approach that of Netflix.
I was thinking that Spotify would actually need to go in the Netflix direction and have the music equivalent of "originals" (that is, signing artists and having their own label) because otherwise record companies would try to spin off their own services and take their content with them (which has happened in video streaming), or the moment Spotify gets too profitable they'll see an opportunity to increase content prices since they know Spotify can afford it.
The difference here is that presumably fewer record companies have the money to fund the development of their own streaming service. The movie industry has much bigger players in the game.
Additionally I don't think anybody's cracked the code on how to make reliably well-received music yet. You can't distract the audience with good visuals and special effects if the plot is no good like in a movie.
>The difference here is that presumably fewer record companies have the money to fund the development of their own streaming service.
They don't need it. With Apple Music, Google Play and Spotify majors can afford to destroy Spotify with royalties as they please, and users will just migrate to other platforms and continue to pay.
It's kinda funny once you think about it. Back in early 00's, when Napster appeared, everybody was "dude, record labels are dead, new business models, bla-bla-bla".
And now we are 18 years later, and majors are quite fine. And they did literally nothing for 18 years. No investments, no development, nothing. They just milked different internet services with their royalties.
> 18 years later, and majors are quite fine. And they did literally nothing for 18 years. No investments, no development, nothing.
Well, except enabling you to buy your music from anywhere, DRM-free, playable with the software of your choice.
Is it really their fault that an all you can eat service for 10 bucks doesn't actually feed anyone, including the artists and the platform itself? It's simply too cheap.
I really would like them to rebuild their Roku app. We recently got a TV with a Roku built in and it's been fantastic, except the Spotify app appears to be a beta from 2014 that never got finished.
We pay for Spotify but we use Pandora on the TV because of the app quality.
I only left Spotify for Youtube Red/Google Music. It was not an easy decision because they have the best music selection and discover imo. They should acquire pandora and then I think they could dominate this space.
Its interesting that you praise Spotify's selection. I love Spotify, have been a Premium subscriber for 4 years, but there are hundreds of songs that I'd like to listen to but have never been available on Spotify. Meanwhile, they're available on Apple Music.
Also, some of the songs that I've saved over the past few years have been removed from Spotify's library - just yesterday I noticed that The Safety Dance is greyed out in my client. (Others include I Walk the Line, Save Tonight and Ambarsariya)
That said, I'm a Spotify lifer. I can't see myself leaving and as for the selection, I live in eternal hope that they'll improve it with time.
Don't blame the service for missing tracks but the artist's label for not putting them there.
I once complained to Sufjan Stevens' label about his albums missing in Spotify. They basically told me the deal with their distributor in Europe expired and they didn't look for a new one yet. "woops". It took them many months to get the tracks back.
I want Spotify to do well, but the reason I'm cautious is the lack of true differentiation. Spotify has a great platform, but I'd worry about the level of control that the labels and artists have over their catalog, and the fact that they make a lot of money as a middleman between consumers and artists... I just feel like I could see another company coming and eating their lunch relatively easily. They're not like Netflix, who has differentiated themselves with exclusive content.
But I REALLY hope they succeed, because I've been a customer since they first announced US support.
Their competitive advantage is discovery and algorithmic playlists. For my part at least, what got me onto spotify was the large library but what keeps me using it is the discover weekly playlist.
I’ve tried Spotify but I cannot upload my own library (lots of mashup, asian music, remix, etc... that Spotify doesn’t have), use it and retrieve it later if needed. I’ve been looking for a service to do that and I couldn’t really find anything except iTunes match. But iTunes match is not really the same as spotify. So I did this spreadsheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ptV0sWO2tBT4c3G8aiB0...
You can do this in Spotify, it's actually one of the main reasons I use it. You need to add your local directory to the list of music sources. The trick to getting that music to sync to other devices is that you need to create a playlist and download it while both devices are on the same local network. Your personal library is never uploaded to the cloud.
Have you looked into Google Play Music? They let you upload your own music, and will try to match it with metadata automatically if they have it available. You can then stream your uploads to any device over Internet (as opposed to LAN which is all Spotify offers IIRC).
I'm a Spotify user, but I still maintain a free GPM account specifically for music that isn't on Spotify.
yeah but I think you can't download it back if you need to. I compared the service a while ago and decided not to go with Google for this reason if I remember correctly. I should have taken better notes.
You can definitely download your music files back from the service. I believe they are stored in 320kbps MP3, but I'd have to check (they might not transcode if you upload lower bitrate MP3). Downloaded a bunch of stuff from GMusic to put on my fiancee's phone just a few months ago.
I've used Spotify for many years now, especially since growing up in Sweden where its been around for awhile, I currently live in North America.
There is a few things that bothers me though. One is that zero effort is spent on solving developer issues in regards to their public API. Some issues has been open far too long on github and the community is unhappy. The other is that they bought up EchoNest, which provided everything Spotify was lacking in terms of a music API, only to close the service and implement none of those features into their public API.
There has been a lot of discussion over the fact they are direct listing, instead of a traditional IPO, and how that will affect the price. However, does anyone know their motivation for doing a direct listing in the first place? They're still paying invest bankers and being 'engaged' with Morgan Stanley. So what's their reasoning, besides shits & giggles?
I really like Spotify but I feel I'm soon going to rebuild an MP3 library. A mix of songs being removed (licensing), the apps being sluggish due to library size and local playlist features being rubbish for years. I've got enough "niche" read: game osts and that to make it worth while.
For anyone considering the same, beets (python) is your best friend
I prefer using Quod Libet. It does take a bit of customizing, but the benefit is that you can customize everything. It also doesn't try to do anything fancy with tags, letting you determine the entire structure you want to use, including custom tags.
It's the only credible alternative to Foobar2000 on Linux.
This is why I like Apple Music. If an album I want isn’t available for streaming I can just buy it. I can also buy music that Apple doesn’t carry (from Beaport for example) and add it to my library and play everything whether streaming, bought through Apple or other services in a single place.
When Spotify launched in USA they increased the prices on their existing markets and lowered the prices for USA below their original. This left me with a sour taste. Now they complain about Stockholms infrastructure while also tax dodging. I know Americans are used to this incredible unhealthy relationship but to me it is rotten to the core.
I cancelled my Spotify premium membership after being a customer for over 2 years, because they refuse to actually develop their application. Their music discovery and playlist radio functionality are horrific right now. They are on repeat essentially, with no way to unlike music that you have liked or accidentally liked.
i can add or remove songs from my library, which seems to have an effect on my discover weekly. I'm in a 3 month trial period for the 2nd time. its worth it at this rate
This Spotify IPO is similar to the Dropbox IPO, when they first started it was a blue ocean situation, almost no competitors, and now there are large tech companies competing, not sure what Spotify or Dropbox's advantages are against these large companies...
But further, could IP and acquisitions be split out and components attributed to this?
They file plenty of patents, and acquisition of entities such as Soundtrap could possibly have elements allocated to R&D. Is this standard/recommended practice?
Eh, still the #1 streaming service in the USA. Record labels + licensing held them back a good bit and has kept them limited to the USA.
Spotify has some huge lawsuits underway for not clearing proper rights for music as well, I believe one is for 1.8 billion. They do have huge investment (ownership chunk) from at least one major label though I believe?
I don't get all the hoopla about Spotify's bad discovery stations. I notice this similar reality distortion field on reddit, feels like marketing.
And I will be keeping my hard drives full of media and cds.
I quit Spotify just recently and transferred to Apple Music. Main reason is because of their new policy on Family plan. I paid for a Family plan since its inception. Recently they updated their policy where every member of the Family plan must have the same address. My brother is working in another town and that doesn't mean we're no longer fam. That is one stupid policy.
Did you try contacting them? A divorced friend's daughter only lives with him at weekends, got cancelled from the family plan. He wrote them and got her added back.
I work away from home in another city weekdays and still in the family plan. If your brother never visits, I understand their rationale though.
Family plan is a bad name probably. It explicitly says it's for people living together, they don't have to be family at all. It's silly to take this as an issue.
Spotify stock is going to get crushed. you think the powerful investments banks of wall street will let someone go around them and not make an example of the stock? If everyone did this and gets encouragement from Spotify - its serious bucks that wall street looses. It may work in the future, but Bold Spotify and its shareholders will pay the price...
You have to go to boutique retailers to get files that are anywhere near the quality of commercially-available CDs. And while subscription models may be common that doesn't make them pro-consumer, the right thing to do, or even a good idea.
Bandcamp is pretty big nowadays, but it could still be considered a boutique retailer when it comes to pop music. It depends a lot on the genres you prefer. No matter what audiophiles claim, 320kbps MP3/AAC/Ogg/etc. files are equivalent audible quality to CDs, and that's what most online music stores sell.
Subscriptions have existed for hundreds of years, for anything from newspapers to soap. Priced correctly, subscriptions are perfectly fine. You pay a recurring fee for a service, and in return you don't have to worry about logistics or storage.
A subscription model could even work perfectly fine for cars (and does, in many cities), as long as it's correctly managed and fairly priced. Pay a set monthly fee, and you get access to a range of cars, parked in a central location near where you live. You don't have to worry about maintenance or depreciation, the car sharing company handles all of that. In return, the monthly rate is lower than what most people would pay to actually own and maintain a car of their own. It works because the costs are shared across a lot more people.
I know a lot of people prefer to own stuff, and I get it in a lot of cases, especially when you know you'll need the item in question for a long time, need to modify or otherwise do something that's outside of a normal use case. On the other hand, I think this race towards owning as much stuff as possible is driving western society to destruction.
> I think this race towards owning as much stuff as possible is driving western society to destruction.
I agree except it is only through ownership that you are free of others' (e.g. your rentors') control. When that control is used almost universally to expand the financial relationship between rentor and rentee, or to enrich the rentor at the further expense of the rentee, it is imperative for individuals to remove themselves from its influence.
Also, if you load 320kbps MP3 and 14.4khz WAV into a spectral analyzer you will find differences, which will be detectable to anyone with the right critical listening skills.
There are good and bad subscription services, it has always been like that.
>Also, if you load 320kbps MP3 and 14.4khz WAV into a spectral analyzer you will find differences, which will be detectable to anyone with the right critical listening skills.
Do you listen with your eyes? A spectrogram can't tell you what your ears will hear.
The only way to know, is to do a proper double blind ABX test on files you encode yourself from known original files. You can use Foobar2000 with the ABX Comparator plugin for this purpose. I think you'll be surprised at just how low you can take the bitrate even on an ancient format like MP3, before you can tell a difference.
It would be super interesting to see if Dropbox and Spotify do well and set an example for profitable tech companies to go public. Companies like Twitter & Snap went public too early IMHO. It’d be a great signal to young entrepreneurs to chase a business model early on.
I think one difference between Dropbox and Spotify and Twitter and Snap is that Dropbox and Spotify sell a desirable, useful product to end users.
In other words, there's a clear function being offered and a clear path to giving them money in exchange for that function.
While both Twitter and Snap are functional, their only real offering is a slight twist on you general social network, and their only way to make money is by advertising to their vast consumer base.
As an investor I'd be far more interested in the revenue streams provided by Dropbox and Spotify.
I would disagree. I think Spotify is in much vulnerable position.
Twitter is selling user generated content, which costs nothing and not going anywhere. Twitter is as popular as ever. Trump, et al.
Spotify is selling something that belongs to major recording labels; Spotify just license it. Majors can change the licensing rules and torpedo the whole business in a one year, and there is nothing Spotify can do about it.
Of course they won't do it, it reckless, but I think they will be adjusting the licensing rules so Spotify will have almost zero profits for the years to come.
As investor, I would sleep much better as a Twitter shareholder.
Also, spotify makes money by offering you a service, instead of data mining your information and making money that way.
Spotify is also insanely cheap in terms of getting basically all the music you would want in the world for around 10 euro's. It's a solid product with a good reason to exist, which fills a niche for many people.
I haven't reviewed yet but from the synopses above, it sounds like they are generating FCF / are cashflow positive? "Profitability" can mean many things (FCF, NI, EBIT, EBITDA, OIBA, GAAP-figures, non-GAAP, etc)... But cash is king in reality so FCF generating isn't a bad meaning here.
Their net cash flow from operations is increasing, but they have negative cash flow from some investing activities (licensing music? buying startups?), which makes total cash flow negative.
What's your point? Blue Apron, Cloudera and Twilio have gone public already... Financials are secret until filing for an IPO and at any given point there are not many companies (tech or otherwise) who have filed, but not yet listed. We don't know who's profitable or who will go public, so the best we can go off of is past history.
Going public is not success if you’re hemorrhaging money. You’re just a pyramid scheme with better marketing, not a profitable business worthy of public investment. That’s my point.
I also think they cracked music discovery. Their discovery weekly playlist is stellar.
My only wish is they'd get off Electron (EDIT Chromium - thanks jjgod) and go native. A music player is a frequently enough used piece of software to optimize for performance.