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Spotify Form F-1

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Re: Spotify Form F-1

#81

Post by kristianc »

foepys wrote: post #15
actuator wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 their cross platform support is the best. 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…

As far as I know the Ubuntu port was made by Canonical and is a Snap package, not an Electron app.

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#82

Post by 8ytecoder »

actuator wrote: post #11
steve-benjamins wrote: post #4

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…

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.

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.

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#84

Post by adventured »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #75
saym wrote: post #18

They've gone from 28 million to 71 million premium subscribers in 3 years with a declining, single digit, churn rate. I'm impressed. I'm a happy Spotify customer, I hope they continue their growth and become a pillar of the music industry.

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. https://www.rogers.com/customer/support/article/share-everyt...

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.

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#85

Post by tomhschmidt »

pyronite wrote: post #66
saym wrote: post #18

They've gone from 28 million to 71 million premium subscribers in 3 years with a declining, single digit, churn rate. I'm impressed. I'm a happy Spotify customer, I hope they continue their growth and become a pillar of the music industry.

I was a Spotify lifer until I butted up against their 10,000 song limit. [1] Now, I'm using Google Play Music. There's no doubt in my mind that everything else outside of this limit is better on Spotify. Please, Spotify, fix this! Let me help inflate your valuation! 1. https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/Library-Song-Limit...

+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.

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#86

Post by Improvotter »

steve-benjamins wrote: post #4

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…

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.

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#87

Post by stochastic_monk »

extr wrote: post #59
steve-benjamins wrote: post #4

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…

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.

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.

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#89

Post by vesrah »

juicy-fruit wrote: post #49
steve-benjamins wrote: post #4

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…

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 ho…

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.

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#90

Post by superted »

steve-benjamins wrote: post #4

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…

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?
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