Spotify Profitability Debate
Comments debate Spotify's business model, profitability challenges, payments to labels and artists, and its competition with piracy versus benefits for musicians.
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The problem is spotify spends money to make money. Other services want to make money off spotify.This is the same issue with Apple, and every other service.
How is Spotify “pocketing back the money”?
What makes you think you'd have made more money if Spotify didn't exist?
No, from Spotify. You aren't paying enough for it. Because you would switch to illegal downloads otherwise. It is hard to offer a successful product when it has to compete against a completely free alternative.
Spotify is not profitable even with paid subscribers?
Maybe Spotify, as the owner and publisher of the content that they paid a lot of money for, realise that THEY are misleading you and they aren’t comfortable with that / feel that you deserve better / would rather that you stay alive so that you continue to send them money [delete as appropriate]
Spotify is a for profit company. What should they care about?
Two things:1) I think Ek is right - there isn't much money in the consumption of music. I do believe music is extremely effective at getting people's attention, but outside of that, it's value is much lower than we currently give it credit for.2) I'm reminded of the TED Talk by Clay Shirky on institutions vs collaboration[0] where he explains power law distribution (watch from 6:01 onward specifically) with regard to photos of Iraq on Flickr. He says (paraphrased) "
What about spotify? Their model should be strong if the others don't count streams.
Why would Spotify care about what’s fair?