Spotify Earnings: The Music Streaming War Is Heating Up

And so what you've ended up with, not surprisingly, is a few key players that happen to own the majority of the IP that is kind of a must have in this industry to have a product offering and a handful of distributors that have gotten scale on distribution of great user experiences like a Spotify, Amazon, a YouTube, whoever you might want to think a... See more

There is an overload of music. 60,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify every day. Over 20% of those don’t get streamed even once. The ubiquitous access to almost every piece of recorded music in history has led to a paradox of choice, promoting passive and playlist-driven music consumption and creating winner-take-all effects for the biggest artists.

In reality, Spotify was subject to the outsized influence of the major-label oligopoly of Sony, Universal, and Warner, which together owned a 17 percent stake in the company when it launched. The companies, which controlled roughly 70 percent of the market for recorded music, held considerable negotiating power from the start. For these major label... See more

The market has reacted. So just to give you an idea, I mean 2014 was really the year where we started to see Spotify was the leader in this industry scale. It was founded in 2006, but it's first five, 10 years of existence, it was a much smaller business, just trying to A, get the access to the content that it needed and then B, just to build it ou... See more

What's driven the growth of this industry for the last five to 10 years is this emergence of streaming. We just talked about how it's more than half the business today. It was single digit seven years ago and so that's just been rapid. All of the growth of the value of streaming has basically come from a few developed markets, historic markets that... See more

The streaming giant is asking record labels and artists for money to advertise their songs within its app, arguing that they’ll reach new fans and increase their popularity. The effort is controversial because it’s complicating wider talks over long-term music rights between Spotify and the record companies.