Hier zul je het even mee moeten doen deze week...

1. Over Spotify (o.a. de beursgang, playlists & mixen)

Only 10 years after it was founded, Spotify is a force to be reckoned with. It has 159 million active users, with 71 million paying monthly subscriptions. The rest are part of Spotify’s “freemium” service and have to listen to ads to get their music free. Annual revenue last year was nearly $5bn. Apple Music has 36 million subscribers.

Spotify claims that it is in the “discovery business” even more so than it is in the music business. "Our brand reflects culture -- and occasionally creates it -- by turning vast and intriguing listening data into compelling stories that remind people of the role music plays in their lives," reads the filing.

I still believe in a future where Everything is a Service [...]. A network, once made, absolutely offers the sort of scalable revenue generation that makes generating significant profits an inevitability.

To that end, it is surely Spotify’s hope that the streaming market ends up being so big that the company’s low gross margin in percentage terms ends up large in absolute ones; even then those profits will come from operational excellence and efficient customer acquisition, not simply top-line growth.

The fact that Spotify exists at all is something of a minor miracle: unknown Swedish company convinces major record labels to upload millions of songs for people to listen to without buying them. It must have been quite the pitch.

Problem is, if Spotify wants to maintain a market leadership position, raising its prices today would be a commercial catastrophe.

Uh... Foutje, bedankt?

A Bulgarian playlist-maker scammed the Spotify payout system for months last year – and could well have made themselves a millionaire off Daniel Ek’s platform. And the best/worst part of all? They probably didn’t break any laws in the process.

Turn off the ‘crossfade’ feature in advanced settings, turn shuffle mode on, play this Drum & Bass Fix playlist, and see what happens with the transition to the next track.

2. Hardop lachen 😂 😂 😂

"If you wanna be a rockstar, look out the window, stare at the clouds and do loud farts."

3. Over Do-It-Yourself

[Bands] can see how much revenue their works are generating globally in real time: "Streaming isn't the villain," [Haggis] says, "but it's shining a light on some of the music industry's historic problems around data, attribution and making sure the right people get paid."

Met lekker veel mooie taartdiagrammen en grafieken.

4. Over songwriting (mooie filmpjes, via Marinus)

Groeten & wie weet tot volgende week!

Niels