Spotify Examined: What Their Report Really Says

Post by earbitscom » Thu, Dec 19, 2013, 8:24 PM UTC

aston wrote: post #6

jere wrote: post #4

>We're set to soon see growth of physical sales eclipse the contraction of physical sales completely. Which means the graph, if expanded a bit, might look like this: It goes up a little bit! I don't understand. To me, the change in physical sales appears to be asymptotically approaching 0. Why assume it suddenly goes positive and then use that guess to make Spotify look deceptive? >Spotify is playing a little fast an…

The projection graph does assume flat physical sales. But it's a stacked chart. Paying to paying is not completely unreasonable, but imagine an airline using the average fares of its Airline Club members (who are often flying first class) vs the fares of average Americans. It's easy to inflate the number when the group of people you're talking about are rich and predisposed to being more engaged. edit to your edit: I…

Post by wmf » Thu, Dec 19, 2013, 8:48 PM UTC

earbitscom wrote: post #21

aston wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The projection graph does assume flat physical sales. But it's a stacked chart. Paying to paying is not completely unreasonable, but imagine an airline using the average fares of its Airline Club members (who are often flying first class) vs the fares of average Americans. It's easy to inflate the number when the group of people you're talking about are rich and predisposed to being more engaged. edit to your edit: I…

Yeah, there is also a bit of this at play when Spotify talks about what they pay artists. They say they pay an average of 70% of revenues, but they don't explain that major labels get way better rates per stream, not just because of the volume of streams. It would be akin to Wal Mart boasting an average $22 per hour salary for all workers because their CEO makes $100M a year while all others make minimum wage.

Post by qq66 » Thu, Dec 19, 2013, 9:17 PM UTC

aston wrote: post #18

Flimm wrote: post #15

> They don't pay per play, so most of your money goes to popular artists no matter how indie your listening habits are. That's a misleading sentence, it implies that your listening choices do not affect how much money goes to indie artists, which is not true. The proportion that each artist gets depends on how many plays they have relative to the plays of all artists in total in a particular time period, which is a p…

I may be appealing to emotion there, but it's certainly not misleading (nor is your claim about Satanists, though I think the proportion going to them is very very small). It's true! Do you disagree that it would be better for the $10/mo a subscriber pays to go only to the artists they listen to?

Post by pbreit » Thu, Dec 19, 2013, 11:00 PM UTC

girvo wrote: post #11

wil421 wrote: post #8

>A Spotify Premium user isn't the average music fan. Disagree I consider myself the average music fan and the reason I like this service is that I have all my music with me where ever I go, even if its not my device. Other people I know who use Spotify are mostly average the other half isnt. Spotify has converted me from a pirate in my younger days to a paid music subscriber.

Your use case is why I have iTunes Match. It's finally not buggy, I love it so much it's the reason I got an iPad mini yesterday instead of a nexus 7, and that was a hard decision.

Post by tedpower » Fri, Dec 20, 2013, 1:39 AM UTC