Huh, their operations have been turning out cash since 2016 (page 11). Curious what they got for their €400 million of 2017 R&D spend (page 10).
Spotify Form F-1
21–30 of 382 posts
Re: Spotify Form F-1
#22It would be super interesting to see if Dropbox and Spotify do well and set an example for profitable tech companies to go public. Companies like Twitter & Snap went public too early IMHO. It’d be a great signal to young entrepreneurs to chase a business model early on.
Excuse me, but Spotify is not profitable, or I miss something? "For the years ended December 31, 2015, 2016, and 2017, we incurred net losses of €230 million, €539 million, and €1,235 million, respectively" How is it better than Twitter?
I haven't reviewed yet but from the synopses above, it sounds like they are generating FCF / are cashflow positive? "Profitability" can mean many things (FCF, NI, EBIT, EBITDA, OIBA, GAAP-figures, non-GAAP, etc)... But cash is king in reality so FCF generating isn't a bad meaning here.
Re: Spotify Form F-1
#23They'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.
*18 million to 71 million in 3 years.
If you contrast this with 51 -> 92 for ad supported MAUs in 3 years it seems like they have been successful in converting a lot of ad supported users to premium ones.
Re: Spotify Form F-1
#24It would be super interesting to see if Dropbox and Spotify do well and set an example for profitable tech companies to go public. Companies like Twitter & Snap went public too early IMHO. It’d be a great signal to young entrepreneurs to chase a business model early on.
How are they profitable? They made a loss of € 1,235 last year.
Haven't checked directly but from comments above seems they are profitable in terms of cash flows?
Re: Spotify Form F-1
#25Huh, their operations have been turning out cash since 2016 ( page 11 ). Curious what they got for their €400 million of 2017 R&D spend ( page 10 ).
They might have bundled the compensation of their engineering team in that.
Re: Spotify Form F-1
#26By far the most interesting part of this is that they are doing a direct listing. There is no IPO underwriter (the bankers that the HN audience loves to bash). The shares will just start trading, pricing should be fun to watch. Update: This nugget from the F-1 [1] alludes to the interesting to watch pricing > Moreover, prior to the opening trade, there will not be a price at which underwriters initially sold ordinary…
If you'd have to bet, do you think it's going to go significantly up or down within the first few days?
WAY up.
Re: Spotify Form F-1
#27They'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'm with you on that. I've been a Spotify Premium member since day 1 of US availability, with no intention of switching to others. The only alternative I've even tried is TIDAL, through their trial, to see if the lossless quality was worth the $10 extra a month, but didn't renew beyond that.
This may be one of my first "buy and hold" stocks simply for the personal reason of loving the service.
Re: Spotify Form F-1
#28I 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…
On the other side of this, I love how easy it is to find new music on Spotify! Every week, the "Discover Weekly" playlist nets me at least one or two new artists I end up loving.
Discover Weekly will suggest a song I loved 10 years ago and completely forgot about. It's really great stuff.
Re: Spotify Form F-1
#29By far the most interesting part of this is that they are doing a direct listing. There is no IPO underwriter (the bankers that the HN audience loves to bash). The shares will just start trading, pricing should be fun to watch. Update: This nugget from the F-1 [1] alludes to the interesting to watch pricing > Moreover, prior to the opening trade, there will not be a price at which underwriters initially sold ordinary…
If you'd have to bet, do you think it's going to go significantly up or down within the first few days?
I think taking either side of this bet would be foolish. You can usually (but not always!) bet on a Day 1 bump for a normal IPO, but there's no historical data for a direct listing of this size, and Spotify might overprice it just because, hey, why not, they get more money and without underwriters the strong incentive to underprice disappears.
If you're not working for a huge bank, stay away from this until it stabilizes.
Re: Spotify Form F-1
#30They'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.
Same. I'm a Spotify lifer unless something catastrophic happens to their service or media availability.
The only alternative service I even debated about was Apple Music when they first announced their streaming service, but there is no clear advantage to their service and I hate the Apple Music UI.
I hope they find a way to help a bigger % of the revenue get into the hands of artists and start cutting out the big record companies who just middleman everything. But other than that, no complaints.