Company / division: Spotify
Microsoft Kills Off its Music Streaming Service, Partners with Spotify Instead (Oct 2, 2017)
Microsoft has today announced that it’s killing off its own streaming music service, Groove Music, and will be partnering with Spotify instead as the latter builds an app for Windows 10 and the Xbox One. This isn’t a huge surprise – Microsoft’s various incarnations of music streaming services have never done as well as its base of Windows users should have enabled them to – but it’s an admission of how completely Microsoft has failed when it comes to consumer content services, where it’s basically a non-player. That, in turn, is indicative of Microsoft’s continued challenges as a consumer ecosystem, especially relative to Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, which dominate much of consumer time and content consumption. Microsoft’s consumer presence is largely limited to its de facto standard status as a maker of paid productivity software and increasingly free standalone productivity apps on mobile platforms, alongside its search and gaming platforms. None of that engenders much positive loyalty to Microsoft from consumers, and it generates very little revenue for the company on the consumer side. And yet it continues to try to straddle the consumer and enterprise worlds in a way few have ever managed to do successfully. Giving up in music is a logical and sensible step, but it’s certainly not going to get Microsoft any closer to cracking the consumer market. Meanwhile, it’s yet another channel – albeit likely not a big one – for Spotify to sign up more streaming music subscribers.
via The Verge
Spotify Launches a Self-Serve, Automated Audio Ad Creation Tool in Beta (Sep 21, 2017)
It’s been increasingly clear in recent months that Spotify has big ambitions for its advertising operation, even going so far as to pitch itself as a threat to Google and Facebook in time. One thing essentially every big ad platform has in common, though, is self-serve tools to enable the long tail of small and medium-sized businesses to buy ads, and that’s an area Spotify hasn’t emphasized enormously just yet. One big challenge is that audio ads are rather tougher to create for small businesses than display ads, and that’s one of the things Spotify is now looking to solve with what it calls the Spotify Ad Studio. The tool will allow advertisers to upload a script and choose music and other options while text-to-speech technology creates the voiceover. That sounds like it could be terrible if it’s anything like other robotic sounding TTS software, but the key is that it dramatically expands the range of advertisers that could run audio ads on Spotify, which now has a large and rapidly growing audience in the US. Given how poorly ad-based streaming music is monetized today, anything which boosts the demand side of the ad market should help raise prices and therefore improve the overall economics, though it’s never likely to rival paid streaming in terms of revenue per user.
via Adweek
Spotify Adds Hulu to $5 Per Month US College Student Subscription (Sep 7, 2017)
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Spotify and Apple Make Video Content Hires (Sep 6, 2017)
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Spotify Reins in Original Video Push, Refocuses on Music-Related Content (Aug 31, 2017)
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Spotify Signs Deal with Warner Music, Paving Way for Going Public (Aug 24, 2017)
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Spotify Launches in Thailand, its Seventh Asian Market and 61st Market Overall (Aug 22, 2017)
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Spotify is Talking to the SEC About its Planned Direct NYSE Listing (Aug 21, 2017)
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Spotify Wants to Rival Facebook and Google in Advertising (Aug 17, 2017)
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Spotify Has 60 Million Paid Subscribers (Jul 31, 2017)
The Financial Times reports that Spotify has hit the 60 million paid subscriber milestone, a fact that has now been confirmed by the company’s press site, where it also says it has 140 million active users in total, suggesting 80 million free users. It had previously reported 50 million paid users in early March of this year, suggesting it took just under 5 months to add a million subscribers, while Apple Music added around half that over the same period. It’s been fascinating to watch Spotify’s growth accelerate in the aftermath of Apple’s launch of its competing service, as streaming takes off as the dominant form of music consumption and paid subscriptions generate the vast majority of streaming revenue. That’s indicative of Spotify’s success in both establishing itself as the de facto standard in the market and creating social features that help win new subscribers, and also at signing partnerships with wireless carriers and others who help promote discounted subscriptions. As Spotify’s financial results for last year show, its average revenue per paid subscriber has been dropping rapidly, something I suspect has continued this year. But it’s the paid business that’s profitable on a segment basis, while free streaming loses money, which is why I suggested in a piece for Variety last week that it ditch the free tier. I’m only partially serious about that – the free tier remains by far Spotify’s best marketing tool, but it also remains a point of contention with the music labels, among which Warner is the remaining holdout in signing a new long-term deal.
via Financial Times
Midia Suggests Amazon Now 3rd Largest Music Streaming Service (Jul 20, 2017)
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Spotify Signs Deal with Sony Music, Leaving Just Warner Among Majors (Jul 11, 2017)
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Spotify Puts Collaborative Playlists in Facebook Messenger (Jun 21, 2017)
Spotify has launched collaborative playlist creation in Facebook Messenger by way of an “extension” (Facebook Messenger’s apps with its app). This will allow multiple friends to work together to populate a playlist even if some of them don’t have Spotify accounts of their own. That in turn turns Spotify into something of a music layer within Facebook rather than merely a proprietary service, and once again raises the question of whether Facebook would ever want to buy Spotify outright and integrate it more tightly into the Facebook experience. Facebook has so far entirely sat out the music market, doing the odd partnership here or there but never becoming a serious player, even though social features are often touted as one of Spotify’s strengths and an important feature for music services overall (though I have to add that a survey I ran a couple of years ago suggested social features are actually well down the list of the most important features users look for). At any rate, this looks like a neat addition to Spotify’s feature set, as well as a useful integration for Facebook Messenger, and a good showcase of what’s possible in Messenger now that the original bots vision has been replaced by something a bit more realistic and focused, with all the user interface elements needed to power something like this.
via Spotify
Storage Required for Top iPhone Apps has Increased 11x Since 2013 (Jun 19, 2017)
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Spotify Tests New Sponsored Songs Ad Unit to Place Songs in User Playlists (Jun 19, 2017)
Any service which becomes central enough to its users’ lives eventually has aspects which become essentially intimate to the user: what feel like private places where the user feels extremely comfortable, and where intrusions of content, ads, or other unwanted outside elements feel like a violation. I suspect users’ own playlists on Spotify feel like just such a place to its loyal users, and so the news that Spotify is testing a “Sponsored Song” ad unit in which songs are literally placed into users’ playlists should be concerning. Almost every ad-based business model eventually engages in such violations, either temporarily or permanently, because the drive is always to push the boundaries of ad load and the places where ads can show – the most valuable real estate is also often the most invasive, and each ad platform has to draw its own line between what is and isn’t acceptable in the pursuit of ad dollars. Spotify’s recently leaked full results for 2016 show that its ad-based business is loss-making even on a gross margin basis, while its subscription business is profitable on that same basis, so there’s always going to be a push to squeeze more ad revenue out of each user. I’ve recently finished a piece for Variety which will publish in the next couple of weeks in which I argue that Spotify should in fact ditch its free tier and go subscription-only, because of all the tradeoffs the ad-based business forces, especially in its relationships with labels. But these types of encroachments into what should be sacrosanct aspects of the user experience are another example of the risks of the free tier, especially relative to the small rewards – just 10% of Spotify’s revenue in 2016.
via TechCrunch
Taylor Swift’s Music Comes Back to Spotify (Jun 9, 2017)
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Streaming Music Boosts Indie Label Payouts by 52% (Jun 8, 2017)
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Weekly Narrative Video – Streaming is Saving Music (May 19, 2017)
This week’s Narrative Video is on the Streaming is Saving Music narrative. This narrative was in the news several times this week, with Spotify’s 2016 financials leaking, news that SiriusXM is debating a bid for Pandora, and Rhapsody’s announcement that it’s making layoffs and replacing its CEO. The reality is that streaming music is doing wonders for the music labels, but the streaming services themselves continue to struggle. And it’s worth noting that it’s paid subscription streaming specifically that’s really giving the industry a boost. The video talks through these topics and other trends in the industry, reality-checking the prevailing narrative. Subscribers can see the video on the Streaming is Saving Music page. If you’re not yet a subscriber, you can sign up for a 30-day free trial here, and you’ll get access to this video, past videos, all the latest commentary on the site, and lots more besides.
★ Spotify’s Losses Widen, Revenue Per Paying User Drops in 2016 (May 18, 2017)
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Spotify Offers 50% Discount to Subs Paying with Capital One Cards (May 10, 2017)
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