You should always be afraid when your entire reason for living is a feature of a larger company.
In fact, a lot of startups have grown specifically because they focus on one thing and their competitors have varied goals.
I don’t know what the numbers are today, but back in the day, the guy in charge of Zune music said they were paying $8 per user for thier subscription music service.
Spotify is completely beholden to its suppliers - the record labels. They can and will squeeze every ounce they can get out of Spotify. Apple can afford to operate Apple Music at break even or a slight loss because it is just a feature to sell high profit margin hardware. That’s all Spotify has, it has to make a sustainable profit from streaming.
Netflix is also struggling under a heavy debt load and is still not consistently profitable.
If any of the major record labels leave Spotify - they are toast. Especially if all four labels stay on a competing service. People are okay with getting thier movies - that they will probably only watch once from different places. No one wants to have multiple playlists from different services.
The music industry already tried that. Before the days of iTunes there were two subscription streaming services - MusicNet and PressPlay. Each had two of the major labels. That failed miserably.
If an artist is exclusively on Spotify, they’ve lost exposure to much of the more affluent users who have iPhones and are more invested in the Apple ecosystem.
Isn't this true for a majority of companies?
But music is definitely something that Apple has been focused on since 2001.
https://qz.com/1214822/dropbox-is-filing-for-a-500-million-i...
The company’s prospectus warns it has “a history of net losses”; anticipates increasing expenses and slowing revenue growth; and notes that it “may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability.”
As far as being “cash flow positive”....
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/21/dropbox-may-have-intentional...
A closer look at its financial statement shows the online storage company's free cash flow would have remained negative that year had it followed a more conservative accounting method shared by some of its main competitors. That's because Dropbox didn't include principal payments for its capital leases in its free cash flow statement. If Dropbox had accounted for the $139.5 million in capital and financing lease payments in 2016, it would have recorded negative $2.1 million in free cash flow that year — instead of the $137.4 million positive free cash flow it disclosed. Its free cash flow for 2017 would have been $169.7 million under this method, almost half of the $305 million it disclosed in its filing.
These are real expenses, that would be like me telling my wife that we would be cash flow positive with our current income if we moved to Seattle - as long as we don’t include rent.