I use spotify. Love it. My family uses Spotify, loves it. I hope they go public.
Why do you hope they go public?
he loves it so much he wants to buy shares, I can't think of other reason.
Spotify preps to go public with 60M subscribers
51–60 of 72 posts
Re: Spotify preps to go public with 60M subscribers
#5260M 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?
To fuel growth, they have been subsidizing the free tiers from the money they get from paid subscriptions. I believe they could actually make profit if they wanted to. Of course it might then hurt their future growth.
Re: Spotify preps to go public with 60M subscribers
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd rather Spotify went public than got bought by Apple, Google, Microsoft or Amazon. The competition is good for everyone.
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.
This makes me sad. Being European, Spotify is one of the few European companies I'm proud of,
Re: Spotify preps to go public with 60M subscribers
#54I'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.
Daily Mix is intended to work this way. It's ought to give you songs that you already know and like, not the new ones.
Re: Spotify preps to go public with 60M subscribers
#55Spotify 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.
Subscribers pay 10$ a month, of which 70% goes to the artists/record labels. Spotify itself then has a a revenue of 3$ per user per month, or 36$ per user per year. 60 million subscribers gives an annually recurring revenue of 2.16 billion dollars. From the chart in the article, they grew from 50 to 60 million subscribers over 4 months, so that annualises to a 60% growth rate on 2.16 billion in revenue (ex royalties). Questionable how long they'll be able to maintain that growth rate, but at the moment it's looking great.
One factor that hasn't been accounted for is the hosting costs for streaming/data transfer. Ballpark: assume the average user listens to music 1 hour/day, 365 days a year, at a bitrate of 320 kbps: 320 * 60 * 60 * 365 = 420480000 kilobits = ~50 gb per user per year. AWS' pricing page [1] has the lowest listed rate of 0.05$/gb (in reality likely lower for a huge client like Spotify), which amounts to a data transfer cost of 2.5$ per user per year, on a revenue of 36$.
Further Spotify has a large number of free subscribers (around 50-100 million, don't think figures have been released for this recently), which produce far less revenue per user from ads, but do generate revenue nonetheless.
Seems to me that it should be entirely possible to become decently profitable, provided that customer acquisition costs don't grow out of hand. For context: Facebook had an ARPU in the US and Canada in Q2 2017 of 19$, whereas Spotify has an ARPU of 9$ per quarter (ex royalties). If Spotify can be half as profitable as Facebook (on a per user base) and can keep growth going at this rate, they should be able to do fine.
Re: Spotify preps to go public with 60M subscribers
#56Love Spotify.
Now if only there was a Spotify equivalent for films in terms of depth and breadth of the available library and spot on recommendations of new films.
Re: Spotify preps to go public with 60M subscribers
#5760M 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?
If you go to any neighbourhood media store, you will notice the Spotify logo on at least more than half of receivers, TVs, radios, media boxes and so on. They are still growing like crazy so I guess this is where all the money is going for now.
Re: Spotify preps to go public with 60M subscribers
#58Nice. Maybe they can purchase SoundCloud with the IPO proceeds.
Spotify is gearing up for what’s being called a “direct listing,” where the company intends to go public without doing an IPO. Insiders, not the company, will be selling shares to the stock market.
No proceeds, only investors caching out.
Re: Spotify preps to go public with 60M subscribers
#59Spotify 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.
Whether or not Apple Music and Google's offers are inferior, are they inferior enough that Spotify can overcome the "power of defaults"? If I'm all in in either ecosystem, the integration benefits of Apple Music may make up for any inferiority. The same could be said about Youtube Red.
Re: Spotify preps to go public with 60M subscribers
#60I'm still angry at Spotify and don't use their service as a consequence. I got Spotify during the beta. Then the advantages were gradually revoked (first a "free" account with less ads iirc, now no perks at all). Nothing surprising but there are way too many other ways to listen to music (and needed to use others for some tracks anyways) for me to comply and subscribe.
Mostly using HypeMachine now. Although it is probably gonna shut down, and all there will be left will be subscription based music services :(