Is Spotify Going Bankrupt in 2017?

It really pisses me off that a company to which I pay €120/year, for a service that costs pennies to operate, is milked to death by the labels and has to "find a path to profitability". Makes me think of just stop listening to mainstream music at all and just live off my old MP3 collection.

Back to torrenting music for me and many others if Spotify goes under. The record labels dont seem to be able to see the forest for the trees..

Well, back to torrenting for the digital and slowly building a vinyl collection for the physical, gonna hold out as long as possible, since the service if fantastic. Nothing in the space , that I've seen, approaches the quality.

This is unfortunate for all, since if labels think they'll see any of the money they currently make off Spotify, they're fucking insane. Nobody likes labels, and all the people I know who are technologically literate enough to torrent music, DO torrent their music. As another commenter said: Milking spotify dry is not seeing the forest for the trees.

I don't really see these types of services staying alive independent of a larger company. Google and Apple can afford to pay what the labels want and can justify it through improving brand recognition, getting lock in, or whatever else they dream up. Spotify has nothing else to prop up, and will get priced out by the big corporations in the same space.

I'm not really happy about it. Spotify has warts but it also has some things I really like that the competitors don't have. The social features are great and I often find links to Spotify playlists around the net, but not for Apple Music.

As a Spotify premium subscriber, I'd happily pay an extra $5 a month (as in, $15 total per month) and I feel like many people would be in the same boat (okay, maybe not $5 but $1-$2 per month). I use Spotify nearly every day and in the US any music I could ever want (I don't listen to Taylor Swift) is on there. I've had some issue with less common music, especially from Asia, but in general this is not the case and I really like the service.

I would guess that some people would initially balk at the idea of raising subscription prices (the same happened with Netflix I believe), and some people would move to another service, but I would guess that the majority of people wouldn't move. On the flip side, Spotify may have some negotiating power but the labels unfortunately have a ton of power and if they couldn't negotiate a contract with e.g. Sony and that music wasn't available, that would cause more people to move. I'm hopeful that Spotify can renegotiate with labels. Maybe they can pull a Netflix and somehow make their own content/become their own label.

I'm not worried about these loans and their terms causing too much issue for Spotify, but I am worried about their lack of profitability. They seem to not have a war chest full of money to run at a loss forever so eventually someone will come knocking, and I just hope the person on the other side of the door isn't asking for enough to cause the house to collapse.

The comments here seem to conflict with the comments on today's other Spotify article:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13556714

The one size fits all pricing model that Spotify has doesn't work well with how record labels want their royalties to be paid out.

Perhaps it's time Spotify became a record label, like Netflix became a content producer.

Music should not live behind a corporate wall. If your overlords are unhappy with you, or they just decide to turn their servers off, no more music for you. Want to recover your costs by selling off the music you bought? No. Want to pass it down to your children? Not allowed. Remember the days when you could own and share things? Those were nice days.

These walled "gardens" are slowly reducing the human digital experience into a prison.

Why don't the labels just build their own spotify? Because they would have to work together?