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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 custom
by saym 9y ago
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.
- actuator 9y ago*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.
- jakereps 9y agoI'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.
- protonimitate 9y agoSame. 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.
- ishansharma 9y agoI was an Apple music since launch(till a month back). But once I tried Spotify and the playlists, I switched instantly. While Apple Music is a competitor, it's not everywhere like Spotify is and their recommendations are horrible. In all time using them, I discovered 2 songs that I liked. With 4 weeks on Spotify, I'm already at 25!
- joezydeco 9y agoI've switched to an Amazon ecosystem (dot, fireTv, etc) and Spotify just works seamlessly between them all. I love it. I have to wonder how many users Spotify picked up when Apple blew the christmas HomePod release and Amazon flushed out Alexa-enabled devices at heavy discounts.
- prklmn 9y agoThe echo dot was the best selling product on amazon over Christmas. Luckily for Apple, I don’t think a $30 device will lock someone into an ecosystem.
- joezydeco 9y agoMan, I don't know. I'm moving away from iOS/Siri/HomeKit/HomePod/iCloud(ugh) instead of moving toward it. It might not be a lock-in, but given my track time on a non-Apple ecosystem and the value I'm getting out of Spotify compared to Apple Music...I'm not going back any time soon. And, yeah: all it took was a $30 device.
- timc3 9y agoAs an alternative opinion I used both Apple Music and Spotify. Apple Music’s recommendation has been amazing for me, and Spotifys terrible and I have fairly strange tastes in music (play dark-Berghein techno, but then like exploring as many genres from around the world as possible). If Apple Music was supported in as many places as Spotify I would drop Spotify.
- kaftoy 9y agoI really don't want to change this discussion into a "which is the best music streaming service" debate, but I am really curious, why haven't your considered Google Play Music? Interface? Songs count? Price? I am subbed to GPM for a few years now. I did it first because Spotify was and still isn't available in my country, but I don't think I would switch if they become available tomorrow.
- shostack 9y agoI used to use GPM and am now a Spotify customer. For starters, I was annoyed that Google removed some of its playlist interface around the activity-based radios. You'd click an activity and there would be several stations/playlists for different styles of music that were great for that general activity. Loved it. Now I can't find it anywhere. Second is the interface in general. Spotify realizes that especially on mobile, you have limited screen real estate. I really dislike Google's choice to overly emphasize giant thumbnails of album art I'll never care about or recognize, at the expense of not providing a list view for all levels of the hierarchy. This also leads to situations where artist names are truncated beyond recognition because there's only a few characters space for them. The GPM app on my Pixel XL also takes seemingly forever to load and play, podcasts often lose their place, etc. Spotify just works.
- singingboyo 9y agoThe album art bit I'll generally agree with, but for the activity bit... not to sound too harsh, but did you even try to find it after they did a minor redesign a while back? Menu ("..." on left in web) > Browse stations > Activities It's right there!
- shostack 9y agoThe change occurred ages ago so I might be forgetting details, but what I think was removed was a more curated way of matching stations with the activity, with descriptions for each. Now it is just a ton of radio stations that often seem unrelated, and no upfront description of what it is unless you click through. Just more giant thumbnails I don't need.
- on_and_off 9y agodisclaimer : I worked for a music streaming service for several years I don't really like the Play Music UI (but I don't hate it either, the new parts are very nice, but the album pages could use a bit more love). I dislike the spotify UI though (why is it THAT dark and depressive ?) and play music removes the ads from youtube (us user) and pays youtubers, so that's an easy choice. Oh, the winning feature of Play Music for me is that I can add my own album, even if it does not belong to their catalog. It still shows with all it's metadata and cover as an album.
- apeace 9y agoYou listed the killer features of Google Music for me: no Youtube ads, auto-pay my favorite Youtubers, and upload my own albums. Also the Youtube Music app. I've found their catalog to be really complete, I've rarely not been able to find something specific I'm looking for. Only advantage I'm hearing from Spotify music users is that the algorithmic selections sound really good. Meh, I put in about an hour a month of surfing different Play Music radio stations and recommendations. Works for me.
- Lewton 9y agoI don’t think it’s possible to really understand how great Spotify’s algorithm is until you’ve experienced it recommending a fantastic song, and you go check the artist out, notice they have less than ten thousand plays and have only released two songs Idk how that’s even possible but it happens once a month for me
- pyronite 9y agoI 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/td-p/1664935 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/Library-Song-Limit...
- tomhschmidt 9y ago+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.
- cheeze 9y agoI'm blown away that the solution for this has been the shitty "local playlist sync" solution for years at this point. I guess I'm in a niche? For me, there are tons of hiphop mixtapes that will never be on Spotify that I definitely need in my music player of choice. Hell, Spotify won't even let me import local MP3 files from my phone!
- fossuser 9y agoI just stopped listening to music that doesn't exist in Spotify. I fought it for a while with local playlist syncing and such, but just wasn't worth it over time. There's enough other music out there that I gave up trying.
- halflings 9y agoYou should give YouTube Music a try. It has both the "regular" catalog you'd expect from Spotify (high quality audio, organised by albums, etc.) + more indy bands that publish their music on YouTube.
- cbhl 9y ago... until Google Play Music goes the way of Google Reader :'(
- 52-6F-62 9y agoIn 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-everything-spotify-faqs https://www.rogers.com/customer/support/article/share-everyt...
- adventured 9y agoThose 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.
- oflannabhra 9y agoYep. Spotify is in an un-enviable position of having a superior product, but with competitors who don't need to earn a profit. Your last paragraph is one of the best takes I've read on this.
- timc3 9y agoSuperior for who? For me Apple Music is the superior product.