Spotify had a £16.66m loss in 2009
eu.techcrunch.com
eu.techcrunch.com
Spotify is a very young company that has managed to successfully enter a market with the highest of barriers to entry, released a technically superb application, and built up one of the most devoted fanbases I have ever seen.
Spotify are still young and they have masses of potential for revenue, I think at this point they just have to have a free service because people dont believe that a service this good could existe, I have a hard time explaining spotify to people that havent used it not because its complicated, just because they dont believe it can work like that.
First of all, I don't see this article as berating spotify. The headline (which is inconclusive at best, not a clear "berating") aside, the article is quite positive about Spotify's stats and their potential over the next few years.
along with it and the last.fm debacle its hard to think techcrunch dont have an anti euro startup
Secondly, this article is on TechCrunch EU, by Mike Butcher, which afaik had nothing to do with the TechCrunch US, Arrington-led "last.fm debacle" if you want to call it that. For anyone who knows Mike, it's hard to accuse him of having an anti-euro startup stance. Mike is probably one of the most active people in Europe when it comes to trying to convince everyone that Europe is a great place for startups.
TC-EU organises events, gets people together, writes about them, and generally does everything they can to help the european startup scene pick up.
But I didnt make this comment on the article in isolation, there is a long list of techcrunch articles questioning spotify's viability ever since its inception, its being held to a much higher standard than it should be, and as as far as I can tell the only company really successfully getting any leverage against record labels I think they should be backed at every opportunity.
> I have a hard time explaining spotify to people that havent used it not because its complicated, just because they dont believe it can work like that.
Any HN readers in the US that want to see Spotify for themselves, send me an email and I'll set you up with an account that will last you two weeks.
Physically taking off your headphones to let ads run gets old! Perhaps the discerning cheapskate puts an analogue volume dial in the chain.
The main reason for people not subscribing is they accommodated to not paying for music #1, and #2 the lack of big (and not so big) names in the catalog (Beatles, Metallica, Rammstein, etc)
Overall Spotify is a great service and I wish them best of luck. And I hope they start making money before Apple start eating their business through the iTunes-on-the-cloud which is sort of a dukenukem3d that never comes.
They may think they have me by the balls, but they're not installed on my computer any more.
Ironically, we were all outraged at this kind of behaviour in the late 90s when it was called adware. Now, magically, it's a good thing.
On the adware front - the app doesn't auto-run, doesn't self install, is easy to uninstall and doesn't show ads when it isn't running. So it bares little resemblance to the adware of the 90s.
With all that said though - I shouldn't imagine they care very much about having non-paying customers 'by the balls' I would expect they care much more about those that pay.
My argument is based on user experience. Both spotify and the 90s adware are on the wrong side of the line separating "understandably has ads" and "annoyingly has ads". No doubt that spotify is closer to the line compared to 90s adware.
Keep this one quiet though, lest spotify find out ;)
I hope they survive because we certainly need something like spotify, but after absorbing the 'Imeem' founders' advice from the start-up school talks I came away with the viewpoint that spotify's future is anything but assured.
As for TC having an 'anti-euro-startup whatever', they report the news, they don't actually make it. Either spotify has a loss or they haven't, don't shoot the messenger. And I'm not exactly a TC fan.
Not that I have a problem with that but TC do like to play clairvoyants.
Good one.
I have been using it ever since it was only out in beta and haven't looked back ever since. Today iTunes is primarily used for iTU and Podcasts all other music is played from Spotify which btw supports locally stored music and actually have a social service that works.
Noteworthy because that's where it started and Sweden can be ahead of the curve from the rest of Europe.
- heard of Spotify
- went to Spotify.com, read something like "Download our thing and play all this Free Music!"
- downloaded their thing
- opened their thing to find an iTunes clone. With no Free Music anywhere to be found.
I spent the better part of 10 minutes trying to figure out how to get it to find and play some of this Free Music before giving up.
I can only assume that most of their potential users are going through the same thing. If so, it's not surprising that they're bleeding money so fast.
I think they used to market it as "we'll find you all sorts of cool music", so the expectation I had was that I'd be able to type in an artist or song and it would run an iTunes-esque "Genius" on it to give you a playlist.
Instead, I'd type in an artist or song and it would come back with no results.
It was happy to play music that I already had on my machine, but seemingly had no capability to go out and find new music from the internet. Given that that was its stated purpose, I was annoyed and uninstalled it.
Double click any of those and it will instantly start streaming the song.
I might have to try again at some point.
Their catalogue isn't too bad for a free service (probably around 40% of what I search for comes up with useful results) although having to listen to adverts every four songs seems a bit much, and it's certainly not worth paying to get rid of them.
Now I use GrooveShark, but it's lacking the artist recommendations. Aside from that it's perfect, and even more portable being browser-based. If I listened to music more often I'd have no problem paying for a Spotify account (which I believe allows you to stream outside of the EU).
And Youtube, or the radio!