Live data from Hacker News

Spotify preps to go public with 60M subscribers

techcrunch.com

41–50 of 72 posts

Re: Spotify preps to go public with 60M subscribers

#41
post #40

Google recently started aggressively marketing Youtube Red. When you watch a youtube video, a small popup asks if you want an ad-free experience, consider upgrading .. This is worrying as Spotify has no moat. Youtube Red is definitely a better value as you ad-free + offline youtube with music. I am a paying Spotify customer and if they improve their client, I might jump ship.

For me, Spotify's moat is the music that keeps on playing when I lock my phone.

Background play is one of YouTube Red's features as well.

Re: Spotify preps to go public with 60M subscribers

#42
post #40

Google recently started aggressively marketing Youtube Red. When you watch a youtube video, a small popup asks if you want an ad-free experience, consider upgrading .. This is worrying as Spotify has no moat. Youtube Red is definitely a better value as you ad-free + offline youtube with music. I am a paying Spotify customer and if they improve their client, I might jump ship.

For me, Spotify's moat is the music that keeps on playing when I lock my phone.

Youtube Red and Google Play Music both have that, and both come together for the price of just Spotify.

That being said, I'm a Spotify subscriber, because its apps are the best.

Re: Spotify preps to go public with 60M subscribers

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe elfchief doesn't want chord.wav to play on the hi-fi system, so doesn't set the DAC as the default device

Pretty much this. I have a pair of studio monitors set up for music and tuned for music. Game audio and random youtube videos don't sound so great with that setup, so I don't want it to be my default. Sure, I could change the default every time I fire up Spotify, but that's annoying and I really shouldn't have to do it -- this kind of setup is not that unusual for music lovers, and it's not a difficult feature to add…

Or use pulseaudio under Linux and enjoy any setup you like of inputs and outputs!

Re: Spotify preps to go public with 60M subscribers

#45

Google recently started aggressively marketing Youtube Red. When you watch a youtube video, a small popup asks if you want an ad-free experience, consider upgrading .. This is worrying as Spotify has no moat. Youtube Red is definitely a better value as you ad-free + offline youtube with music. I am a paying Spotify customer and if they improve their client, I might jump ship.

"Youtube red is not available in the United Kingdom"

Re: Spotify preps to go public with 60M subscribers

#47
post #7

I've had Spotify for 5 years or so, and mostly used it to look up songs I already liked, and to create playlists to listen to while studying/working/programming. It was already pretty awesome for that. Then I started checking out the "Related Artist" section, and started discovering new music after such a hiatus of music discovery since my younger years. But where Spotify has really just excelled, and dare I say chan…

I liked the "radio" and daily mix things at first, but they often repeat the same songs and haven't really gotten me anything new for a while. They generate a new one if I go to a completely different genre, but it doesn't seem to evolve over time.

Re: Spotify preps to go public with 60M subscribers

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going public is guaranteed to end in them getting acquired by a US media or tech company. Once public, it won't take long for the present owners to lose control to far more powerful financial entities. The VCs will all liquidate out, leaving a power vacuum that will be gradually filled by those new parties, and they'll do the same thing they always do.

So buy spotify shares then, they’ll go up?

Or they go down until a party just buys all of their shares. It's pretty much a gamble.

Re: Spotify preps to go public with 60M subscribers

#49

Spotify is nice, but do they really have in chance of being decently profitable on such slim margins? They are competing against two large companies that don't live or die by whether their music subscription business is profitable - Apple and Google.

That is assuming Apple or Google has a product that even tries to complete on quality.

Both of their Music product is far inferior to Spotify. And this is speaking form an Apple Fans who really wanted to paid Apple some money but cant.

Re: Spotify preps to go public with 60M subscribers

#50

60M subscribers and still not profitable, why? Would you buy a stock in a company that has been in business from last 11 years and cannot make a profit yet?

Still heavily investing in acquiring music licenses and expanding their business I guess?

That's the modern time, businesses don't aim to make a profit anymore, they aim to grow. AMD is a good example of this practice, it usually ends each quarter with a half a billion in losses [1], with some exceptions here and there. It goes from an almost 4 billion loss to a 1.3 billion profit. It's amazing it still exists, but that's what investor money is for I guess.

[1] https://ycharts.com/companies/AMD/net_income_ttm

Post reply on HN