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Spotify opens on NYSE, valuing company at almost $30B

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Re: Spotify opens on NYSE, valuing company at almost $30B

#221

Post by xfer »

joshjkim wrote: post #172

biggest jump ball: Apple/Google/Amazon competing services. spotify deserves real credit for changing how people consume music, and I think that story will serve them well in the short-term, but their biggest risk is Apple/Google/Amazon who provide competing services that don't have any current pressure to turn a profit - Tim Cook basically said "we don't plan to make money"[1], a bad thing to hear from your primary c…

Apple is not even close to a competitor to Spotify, they don't even have a web interface for listening to music..do you think everyone in the world is Apple product user?

Re: Spotify opens on NYSE, valuing company at almost $30B

#222

Post by bogomipz »

_zachs wrote: post #168
synaesthesisx wrote: post #27

I do love Spotify as a product, however I don't think it will scale the same way Netflix does. Spotify is at the mercy of major record labels, and as their books become more transparent the record labels will squeeze every dollar they can for licensing. That is, unless they find a way to upend the record industry entirely. Spotify has a unique position with their amazing discovery/recommendations engine- they could p…

Starting their own label is exactly what they need to do to remain competitive. It's exactly what Netflix ended up doing and I think it's turning out pretty well for them. I wouldn't be surprised if Spotify tried poaching higher-level strategy people from Netflix.

>"Starting their own label is exactly what they need to do to remain competitive. It's exactly what Netflix ended up doing and I think it's turning out pretty well for them."

This seems to be a common refrain that Spotify can just "pull a Netflix." And this is very unlikely.

Firstly no matter how much opriginal content they could create, if they don't have back catalog it's going to be a total non-starter for the mainstream. A streaming service that has no Beatles, Pink Floyd, No Motown, No AC/DC etc is going to shed users pretty quickly.

Also music and movies occupy very different spaces in peoples lives - emotionally, socially, where and how they're consumed and shared etc.

People need music for their commute, for their workouts, for their parties, at bars and for their workdays. People only need movies when they're home or maybe stuck on an airplane.

Lastly Spotify needs to stay in the record label's good graces. If they were ever to be viewed as a competitor or a thread to any the big 3 record labels it would be reflected in punitive price increase when it came time to renegotiate their licensing deals.

Re: Spotify opens on NYSE, valuing company at almost $30B

#223

Post by TheGRS »

FreakyT wrote: post #196
_zachs wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starting their own label is exactly what they need to do to remain competitive. It's exactly what Netflix ended up doing and I think it's turning out pretty well for them. I wouldn't be surprised if Spotify tried poaching higher-level strategy people from Netflix.

It would definitely be a good direciton to go in, but I suspect a major potential problem for Spotify will be the possibility that the major record labels pull their tracks off Spotify in retaliation. This was less of an issue for Netflix as Netflix streaming already had an extremely limited selection of third-party licensed content.

IIRC the original content was in response, not in spite of 3rd party content pulling out of Netflix.

Re: Spotify opens on NYSE, valuing company at almost $30B

#224

Post by heartbreak »

whatok wrote: post #72
whitepoplar wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discover Weekly

Who is listening to all of this self-published music to get training data for Discover Weekly?

I don't know if Paul Lamere is on HN, but he's likely the best person to answer this question. Short answer: It's not all about user-fed listen data.

Re: Spotify opens on NYSE, valuing company at almost $30B

#225

Post by harshgupta »

meritt wrote: post #96
harshgupta wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify is a tech company by all measures. Their core value propositions - recommendation engine, UI/UX, scaling responsive applications - those are pretty 'tech' problems.

And exactly the same can be stated for Blue Apron and Stich Fix, thus the point of my rhetorical question. Just because the two in question aren't as sexy as Spotify or Dropbox shouldn't exclude them from being considered a tech company. I'd argue that the logistics of shipping perishable food is significantly more difficult than streaming an audio file, and recommending clothing to meet an individual's specific styl…

Just so you know, 1.recommender systems != collaborative filtering. 2.RBMs are good only for certain situations like explicit ratings (where users provide direct feedback), its a really hard problem in implicit recommendations (which are most sites). See Bayesian Personalised Ranking Algorithm. 3. >I'd argue that the logistics of shipping perishable food is significantly more difficult than streaming an audio file. Thats exactly the point. I am not measuring hardness. But that looks a supply chain problem that a software engineering problem.

Re: Spotify opens on NYSE, valuing company at almost $30B

#226

Post by jklinger410 »

komali2 wrote: post #130
jklinger410 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who just made this choice, let me add some insight. - My friends use Spotify - Larger library - Well made playlists - Social feed In the end, they are very similar products. I feel that Spotify has a huge head start on Google here, and it shows. The more mature product is Spotify. I think Google can't really compete in terms of curation and popularity. Really, the edge cases of "music that is not on Spotif…

Are there any specific artists that you've been able to find on Spotify but not on GPM? I haven't run into this problem yet (except one time when Mick Gordon maybe forgot to renew or something his Wolfestein soundtrack? It was fixed within a week though)

I am friends with several small music publishing groups (I hesitate to call them record labels) and every artist is excited to get their album up on Spotify...and that's it.

Many of the self publishing activity that Soundcloud was/is famous for has moved over to Spotify.

New releases from smaller acts seem to be Spotify FIRST right now.

Re: Spotify opens on NYSE, valuing company at almost $30B

#227

Post by aphexairlines »

POTUS wrote: post #206
kgwgk wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spotify was first for on-demand streaming in the modern era I guess that’s true if you define the “modern era” as “starting with Spotify”.

Help me out, I genuinely can't think of a music streaming service that came before Spotify. I vividly remember being blown away by their product when it came to market. I remember because I had never seen anything like it and literally didn't believe it could be done at that time. I was waiting for a train and could just search for any song and play it right away from my phone, no downloading, no waiting, just instan…

Spotify launched in 2008. Rhapsody launched in 2001, then added content from major labels in 2002.

Re: Spotify opens on NYSE, valuing company at almost $30B

#228

Post by unethical_ban »

komali2 wrote: post #217
POTUS wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Help me out, I genuinely can't think of a music streaming service that came before Spotify. I vividly remember being blown away by their product when it came to market. I remember because I had never seen anything like it and literally didn't believe it could be done at that time. I was waiting for a train and could just search for any song and play it right away from my phone, no downloading, no waiting, just instan…

Pandora radio started in 2000 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_Radio Myspace was a popular way to share music, if limited. Youtube, again though this doesn't fully fit the definition. Anybody know about soundcloud? I know I was using that before I heard of spotify but I'm not sure if it came out beforehand.

Pandora wasn't on demand until very recently. It was "station only".

Myspace def. was limited and didn't have full catalogs of all music in any scope approaching Spotify.

Youtube is video that has music, and can't be conveniently used on mobile or used for music discovery explicitly.

Soundcloud is actually the closest to what I meant, but it obviously isn't used for record-label music distribution en masse.

Re: Spotify opens on NYSE, valuing company at almost $30B

#229

Post by jklinger410 »

skinnymuch wrote: post #145
jklinger410 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who just made this choice, let me add some insight. - My friends use Spotify - Larger library - Well made playlists - Social feed In the end, they are very similar products. I feel that Spotify has a huge head start on Google here, and it shows. The more mature product is Spotify. I think Google can't really compete in terms of curation and popularity. Really, the edge cases of "music that is not on Spotif…

Can you give an example of the larger library? Yeah I like the social feed. Wish you could get to it on mobile though.

I'm not going to dig around for metrics on this, but my intuition is that Google covers a larger base of "established" musicians whereas Spotify seems to be dominating new releases from smaller artists.

Google Music, Pandora, iTunes, are seemingly there to cover bases. The momentum appears to be towards releasing your music on Spotify first for your friends to listen to.

Re: Spotify opens on NYSE, valuing company at almost $30B

#230

Post by unethical_ban »

kgwgk wrote: post #153
unethical_ban wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify was first for on-demand streaming in the modern era, even before Google or Apple Music. Its radio/recommendations are better than Pandora, and I haven't tried others. I think Spotify's UI is fantastic, and its multi-device awareness is functional and intuitive. To your point, Google does have ad-free Youtube, but the ads don't bother me enough/I don't watch enough Youtube for it to impact me like it does with…

> Spotify was first for on-demand streaming in the modern era I guess that’s true if you define the “modern era” as “starting with Spotify”.

I define modern era as "doing anything approaching what spotify does regarding playlists, on demand music and discovery".
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