>They need a bigger cut. 17% will not have a big enough impact to its bottom line.
What's stopping them from bigger cuts? We've seen that big SW products can run on lean teams(whatsapp, post-Musk Twitter) and we know many large tech companies are overloaded with way more workers than they need to run(Google), just because they could overhire when money was free.
>Apple and Amazon will eventually eat Spotify given enough time, if they don't find a moat to be built
What prevents Google from doing the same? They already have a large customer base in Android users.
For anything other than American and maybe European music, YouTube Music is so much better nowadays wrt availability. YouTube Music has stellar quality of recommendations too.
But Google could easily do a Google and sabotage the product at some point.
About a decade ago they had Google Music. A friend of mine really liked it. He was supposed to have a for-life price of $7/month (or something) and then they raised prices and failed to grandfather his price in. Being Google, there was no way for him to complain about this to them, so he cancelled and used a product he liked less, out of spite. At some point they launched a duplicative product, YouTube Music, which they later migrated all customers to.
>He was supposed to have a for-life price of $7/month
At this point, consumers should know that "for life price" is a scam to get gullible customers through the door and gain market share or collect user data. Just like with a Ponzi scheme, consumers should realize by now why such pricing is not sustainable long term due to inflation and other costs, and either the business will crash or they'll have to inevitably backtrack on that promise and raise prices to stay afloat. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
No excusing Google of this scam, but they only did what every other company with these kind of hollow promises did.
I vividly remember Cerberus on Android was selling one time licenses for life, only for them to backtrack on that years later and switch everyone to their subscription instead, publishing a letter along the lines of "sorry, we know it sucks, but the lifetime licenses we sold you are unsustainable financially for us, so we'll switch you to subscription UwU."
Spotify is actually trying to make money. If the goal of running Spotify was to get everyone to listen to the CEO's crappy garage band, maybe then it would be a valid comparison.
Unless they can somehow turn "use" into money, more use does nothing to help X as a company. And the prior method of turning use into money, advertisements, has been dropping like a rock due to the inability of the company to keep ads away from toxic content no advertiser would ever want their ads near.
Can't cut costs to profitability if you are cutting revenue faster than costs.
- Features have to keep being deprecated because once they degrade it's too hard to fix.
- Use is only up when measuring metrics like "we hit our peak user-seconds" which only measures short term usage spikes and not longer time-scale sustaining metrics.
- Lack of diversity of users, instability of ads performance, and a CEO making antisemitic and anti-Palestinian claims has led to advertisers pausing Twitter ads at a high rate. Valuation has dropped to $10s of Billions instead of $44B.
- Small bugs never get fixed (on Firefox mobile if I accidentally hit the "Views" button on a tweet, the pop-up modal is inescapable and breaks my back button and tab state, so I have to open Twitter in a new tab.
That is meaningless when the vast majority of users aren't paying and won't pay for the foreseeable future. Advertisers pay, and Elon is doing all he can to drive away advertisers. Ad quality on Twitter has severely degraded over the past two months and we all know why.
Before trialing the iTunes franken-nightmare that is Apple Music, I would have probably agreed with you.
However, after that experience, I'm starting to think there's no way in hell a massive multi-product conglomerate like Apple/Amazon is going to overtake a single-product music streamer like Spotify.
Apple/Amazon are clearly stretched too thin, and in a worse strategic position on audio due to the way the licensing agreements shook out. In music, everybody basically has access to the same catalog on every platform.
And given that songs are 4 minutes long (vs 4 hours binging TV shows), you spend wayyy more time interacting with the software in audio vs. video. So in audio, it's purely just deciding which UI/features you like best.
Spotify seems to be trying its best to screw up the UI, but no way it ever gets as bad as Apple Music given that's their only meal ticket.
> However, after that experience, I'm starting to think there's no way in hell a massive multi-product conglomerate like Apple/Amazon is going to overtake a single-product music streamer like Spotify.
Amazon Music Unlimited is very neat experience compared to Spotify... Good catalogue (for me), better music quality and it's app is just plain, boring music player not something neurotic like Spotify...
The one thing I could not figure out about Amazon music is that when I would type in an album, and start playing it, the songs would reshuffle based on which songs I would listen to the most. It drove me insane, and caused me to cancel the trial before it was even up. I couldn't figure out how to play an album in the actual order of the album. Dumbest feature I've seen in a product, maybe ever.
This is an anecdote, and maybe it's just coincidental timing, but these kinds of operational choices do not work well in a company focused on a single product across multiple devices. Losing so many workers so quickly means a loss in productivity on the issues the platform has, and Spotify has many. Since November there has been an issue on PS5 where any podcast over an hour will not play on PlayStation(so, basically all podcasts). People have figured out the issue, and Spotify has not moved on it.
When you offer a single service and the benefit is being device agnostic, "cutting costs" by wasting time hiring people you probably didn't need to hire only to fire them a year or two later means an amplified disruption that will lose customers.
But hey, board members who jerk each other off once a month in a conference call who are already rich made a little more money by hiring a bunch of people only to fire them later and at a huge operational waste.
Explain. Because as far as I'm aware all of the record labels have deals with all music distributors (it doesn't make sense not to, they are in the business of showcasing their copyrighted properties), you can even distribute instantly to all streaming services through labels and distributors.
I don't think you know what you're talking about...
> Apple and Amazon will eventually eat Spotify given enough time, if they don't find a moat to be built
I doubt it.
Apple is restricted to Apple devices. As for Amazon, the same argument could be made about Prime Video eating Netflix, and that never seemed to happen.
On top of that, as far as I know, Spotify is profitable.
They need to have enough money to invest in other initiatives, as the business they are in is proven to be margin-thin.
Apple and Amazon will eventually eat Spotify given enough time, if they don't find a moat to be built