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

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201–210 of 232 posts

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

#201
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.

Otoh your chances of hiring that talent are lower if you're the aggressor responsible for the stock tanking

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

#202
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.…

Apple Music is available in the iTunes desktop app (Mac, dunno about Windows).

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

#203
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but isn't this whole deal premised on the notion that if investors want to head for the exits 3 months after the IPO, Spotify (and its employee shareholders) are fucked anyway? I agree it has to have some diluting effect, but if this capital is the difference between a successful IPO and a failed one, I'm not sure how you argue it represents a loss of value to employees.

If 80+% of your assets are in just one company you don't control then you really should be heading for the exits. Google quickly hit 6x there IPO, but if you had say 5 million at IPO and nothing else then selling 1 million of that would have been a really good idea. Or at least getting a put option to sell near the IPO price. Granted, you must pay taxes ect. But taking 20% off the top is generally a really good idea.

Who said 80% of any of the investors assets are in just one company?

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

#204
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 80+% of your assets are in just one company you don't control then you really should be heading for the exits. Google quickly hit 6x there IPO, but if you had say 5 million at IPO and nothing else then selling 1 million of that would have been a really good idea. Or at least getting a put option to sell near the IPO price. Granted, you must pay taxes ect. But taking 20% off the top is generally a really good idea.

Who said 80% of any of the investors assets are in just one company?

I think they are talking about employee shareholders.

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

#205
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or I can simply pay for basically any other service that does the same job without facebook (even though I have an old account), without social features, without a shitty client that drains computer resources in mysterious ways. But finally, an app that doesn't require me to share my pictures with them. That was the spike in the coffin for me. I really enjoyed Spotify when it was new, but their clients has just been…

> [...] their clients has just been lowering in quality ever since beta. > Honestly, I think the beta client was way better than the client today. As a response to a post only stating that you don't need to use their client? Seriously? Also, what has facebook to do with anything?

I wonder if this is in regard to the fact that for a while, some time ago, Spotify required the use of a Facebook-integrated login. They no longer do, but people who signed up during that time would need to go through a conversion process to have a non-Facebook login.

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

#206
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spotify waste so much money on their employees, who effectively do very little Plenty of businesses waste money on some employees who effectively do very little, like diversity officers, equality consultants and such useless positions ... The problem isn't them , the problem here is Spotify unstustainable business model, period. They will go down, sooner or later. The fact that they had to take a loan means they ca…

A diversity officer isn't necessarily a waste of money. They can be crucial for ensuring a solid company culture that levages talents from a diverse pool of people. If you make your company inhospitable to groups of employees based on their race or religion you are only hurting your bottom line.

A diversity officer isn't a waste of money if it impresses other people who want to give you business and pat themselves on the back for supporting diversity. If you pay someone $500k/year to be a "Chief Diversity Officer" and that shields the company from bad publicity, then it's probably "worth it", even if that person sits in their office playing solitaire all day long.

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

#207
post #163

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.

>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…

Piracy offers lower than $5/month (and usually better selection). Any business plan that doesn't account for piracy is fantasy.

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

#208
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always been very put off by their rah rah support for Agile. In many ways, I think Spotify cargo cults on the Netflix culture document, but they don't actually have a tech culture identity that they've created for themselves, they just make a big fuss about Agile, oppressive open-plan spaces, and fancy parties. I think Spotify is a great example of why job candidates should look before they leap when it comes to…

> I think Spotify might actually do better by creative innovative new engineering features and improvements If the problem is user acquisition, you don't get there with engineering improvements. Only exception is if those tech/product improvements are for increasing virality. Yes they'll probably spend the money on marketing / PR, which makes sense since that's likely where the bottleneck (or foreseeable bottleneck g…

I'd argue that engineering improvements would be key for user acquisition.

Where is that massive growth supposed to come from if the app is too complicated for users older than 30 years and too bloated for devices older than 2 years?

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

#209
post #198
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, I personally never understood SoundCloud … it’s completely opaque to me and I don’t understand how I would even begin to use it. I simply don’t get it. But I also mostly use Spotify to listen to music I already know and sometimes get recommend stuff I like, but that’s not the primary function. Maybe our music listening habits are just completely different? I don’t think there is anything wrong with Spotify or So…

SoundCloud (and MixCloud, not related) offers a lot of home-created content, but maybe more importantly, provide longer live and studio mix sessions by well known (and lesser known) DJs.

Ah, I suspected something like that. I think I’m just not into that scene, so that’s completely meaningless to me.

If you are into that it’s probably exactly right for you and something like Spotify would be a poor fit to your needs.

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

#210
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but isn't this whole deal premised on the notion that if investors want to head for the exits 3 months after the IPO, Spotify (and its employee shareholders) are fucked anyway? I agree it has to have some diluting effect, but if this capital is the difference between a successful IPO and a failed one, I'm not sure how you argue it represents a loss of value to employees.

If 80+% of your assets are in just one company you don't control then you really should be heading for the exits. Google quickly hit 6x there IPO, but if you had say 5 million at IPO and nothing else then selling 1 million of that would have been a really good idea. Or at least getting a put option to sell near the IPO price. Granted, you must pay taxes ect. But taking 20% off the top is generally a really good idea.

I agree. I'm not arguing that employees shouldn't cash out when they can. I'm saying that if investors as a whole are getting cold feet 3 months after the IPO, those employees were never likely to be able to recoup much value from their equity in the first place, regardless of whether these lenders get to dive off the sinking ship first.
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