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Spotify raises $1B in debt with devilish terms to fight Apple Music

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Re: Spotify raises $1B in debt with devilish terms to fight Apple Music

#161
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All out war for streaming customers with apple and google. Someone is going to collect $10 (plus $1 or $2 increase every couple years) per month for a huge segment of the music listening population for basically the rest of our lives. Spotify want it to be them.

Still waiting for competition to affect prices. Eg I would be happy to pay 5$/month for limited, ad free access to Spotify/ whatever, but 10$ seems excessive. Given that we may indeed pay this for the rest of our lifes, it's strange nobody seems to mind the cost.

$10 seems like an amazing deal to me. Heck, I'd easily pay $20.

Re: Spotify raises $1B in debt with devilish terms to fight Apple Music

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who buys a lot of music, this attitude seems very alien to me - 10 bucks for a very large collection? It's an insane deal - so good that hardly any artist can live off it. Don't get me wrong - I'm not a fan of streaming services and prefer to own my music (a large part of which isn't available for streaming anyway) but for most people this is an incredibly fair deal.

$10/month when I already own a lot of music. I wasn't spending that on new music before streaming. I've gone with Google Music for this reason - my personal collection is in the cloud for streaming purposes (saved me the hassle of a home media server) - I occasionally buy new music from various sources and upload it to my account.

Ok, got it - I use streaming in addition to buying my music, mostly as a preview hub. Maybe you stopped buying music that frequently at some point, but since I easily buy 10 albums a month the price for streaming and comfortable previewing is a fair share of that budget.

Re: Spotify raises $1B in debt with devilish terms to fight Apple Music

#163
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All out war for streaming customers with apple and google. Someone is going to collect $10 (plus $1 or $2 increase every couple years) per month for a huge segment of the music listening population for basically the rest of our lives. Spotify want it to be them.

Still waiting for competition to affect prices. Eg I would be happy to pay 5$/month for limited, ad free access to Spotify/ whatever, but 10$ seems excessive. Given that we may indeed pay this for the rest of our lifes, it's strange nobody seems to mind the cost.

>Still waiting for competition to affect prices. Eg I would be happy to pay 5$/month for limited, ad free access to Spotify/ whatever, but 10$ seems excessive.

No competitor can offer $5/month unless the service is positioned as a loss leader. The overwhelming costs for streaming music is the licensing and royalties of music content. In other words, if Spotify paid their programmers half the market rate salaries to save overhead costs, they still couldn't sell online music for $5/month.

If "loss leader" is a legitimate business strategy, it means only the big companies with offsetting non-music revenue like Amazon/Google/Apple can offer cheap streaming music. Companies with music-only revenue like Spotify/Pandora/Tidal would not be able to compete with that.

Re: Spotify raises $1B in debt with devilish terms to fight Apple Music

#164
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can probably pay in kind and screw the investors more. Better than paying cash.

elaborate please? this is not my area of expertise.

In kind interest payments let the lender increase the principal balance instead of actually paying interest. In this case it would be like issuing 10% more equity per year instead of paying the 10% in cash. It wasn't mentioned in the article if they have that option, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Re: Spotify raises $1B in debt with devilish terms to fight Apple Music

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still waiting for competition to affect prices. Eg I would be happy to pay 5$/month for limited, ad free access to Spotify/ whatever, but 10$ seems excessive. Given that we may indeed pay this for the rest of our lifes, it's strange nobody seems to mind the cost.

As someone who buys a lot of music, this attitude seems very alien to me - 10 bucks for a very large collection? It's an insane deal - so good that hardly any artist can live off it. Don't get me wrong - I'm not a fan of streaming services and prefer to own my music (a large part of which isn't available for streaming anyway) but for most people this is an incredibly fair deal.

yes, but it depends on your listening habits. I am oddly fine just listening to the music I own, and buying some more every now and then, so I spend significantly less than 10$/m now. Would be interesting to try a streaming service, but it would be a good deal more expensive for me.

Anyway, maybe I should try one of the free offers. :-)

Re: Spotify raises $1B in debt with devilish terms to fight Apple Music

#166
post #56

Spotify waste so much money on their employees, who effectively do very little. I know a designer who has been there 2 years, basically sits in meetings and gets sent to different countries, and has added nothing to their portfolio. Yet gets reviews and raises and bonuses... Then there's all the parties they host for their employees, etc. It's not a company I would invest in if I had any money to begin with. Also tha…

The modern desktop app is at a point where it's pretty solid, but I still miss that old 0.80.x branch or whatever the final non-chromium verison was. But you know what? Google doesn't have a desktop app for Google Music. Amazon doesn't have a desktop app for Amazon Prime. Apple doesn't have a desktop version... so yeah, despite the fact that Spotify's only-one-in-the-business desktop app isn't perfect, it does exist.…

0.8.5.1356 still alive and kicking in this office...

Re: Spotify raises $1B in debt with devilish terms to fight Apple Music

#167
post #117
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The modern desktop app is at a point where it's pretty solid, but I still miss that old 0.80.x branch or whatever the final non-chromium verison was. But you know what? Google doesn't have a desktop app for Google Music. Amazon doesn't have a desktop app for Amazon Prime. Apple doesn't have a desktop version... so yeah, despite the fact that Spotify's only-one-in-the-business desktop app isn't perfect, it does exist.…

Pretty solid is a bit of an exaggeration in my case. About once a day, my MacBook's fans start spinning like crazy. By now I know... oh, it's "Spotify Helper" stuck in a loop again, lemme force quit it. Before I reinstalled, instead Spotify would show me "there's a new version!" every single day, seemingly without upgrading anything. These serious quality issues, plus the horrifying visual ads (for playlists and new…

    rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/com.spotify.client/
fixes that for me. For a while.

I had no idea it was another fucking chrome wrapper now. It used to be completely native didn't it? This explains a lot.

Does anyone fancy putting the last good client up on mega or something?

Re: Spotify raises $1B in debt with devilish terms to fight Apple Music

#168
post #47

Paid on-demand streaming is such a crappy business that it's outsold by vinyl records . Selling music downloads is a real business, but streaming, not so much.

Digital Locker is the way to go. Who, in their right mind, thought is was fine to pay for a "download". Valve understood that early and look where the gaming distribution industry is at: all the big players have the same digital locker solution, which is really just selling a license and offering the download part for free.

Re: Spotify raises $1B in debt with devilish terms to fight Apple Music

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$10/month when I already own a lot of music. I wasn't spending that on new music before streaming. I've gone with Google Music for this reason - my personal collection is in the cloud for streaming purposes (saved me the hassle of a home media server) - I occasionally buy new music from various sources and upload it to my account.

Ok, got it - I use streaming in addition to buying my music, mostly as a preview hub. Maybe you stopped buying music that frequently at some point, but since I easily buy 10 albums a month the price for streaming and comfortable previewing is a fair share of that budget.

Yeah, spotify is not a great deal if you're just using it instead of your CD collection.

OTOH you can listen to hundreds of dollars worth of new music in a day if you want to, with no risk. If you pick something on a whim that turns out not to be good, just move on to the next album or artist. It's like going to a record fair with an unlimited budget, and a truck to carry your finds home in. There is a never-ending supply of crazy stuff on there.

If you use it like this, it's incredible.

Re: Spotify raises $1B in debt with devilish terms to fight Apple Music

#170
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Apple care about Spotify's stock price?

Well it's a really dirty tactic, but it can be hard to retain top talent (who are largely rewarded with options/shares) if a company's stock price crashes.

I would hardly call codemonkeys working at Spotify or Apple """talent"""
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