Stefan's Naturally Aspirated Blog

Spotify’s recent Q1 results show overall subscribers up to 217 million, with paying subscribers reaching 100 million for the first time. At the same time revenues are rising to $1.68 billion while the bottom line is still one of loss - or around -$159 million this quarter - slightly down year-on-year.

In Q1 I also discovered a limit to Spotify’s capabilities that did not impress me much - the maximum 10,000 tracks you can download to your mobile devices. I for one am ...

Let me preface this piece by saying that I’m one of the biggest music fans of all time. I have an extensive collection of vinyl and CD - running well into the many thousands - to such a degree that I really ran out of space. So as logic dictated - I took to digital media as the only rational way to consume, ’store’ and organise music nowadays.

Back in my youth we had Vinyl to play at home, and tape or cassettes to play in the car or on the move (Sony Walkman anyone?)....

I will preface this article by saying that I am a long term music fanatic - having amassed some circa 10,000 12" records over the years, as well as a considerable volume of CDs - music is a constant in my every waking moment. Over the past 10 years I have gradually and almost fully transitioned to digital. I’ve been using iTunes since 2010, and am an early adopter of Spotify. I buy between 2 and 10 albums worth of music on roughly a weekly basis - this comes from a variety of sources - ...

Pew Research reports that people check their smartphones 100 times a day on average. At the same time this current generation’s attention span continues to dwindle (increased ADD). Of course the world is totally over-saturated with media, to an extent that people no longer seem willing to consume any form of media in-depth as it were. This generation of consumers is what I designate ’Skimmers’ - they only consume media superficially really and at great haste.

Examples...

Apple’s recent $3.2 Billion purchase of Beats has been seen as ’extremely generous’ by many industry commentators. As a counter though, a recent article in the Telegraph goes so far as to predict the imminent demise of Spotify in the face of this acquisition - somewhat erroneously claiming that the only thing left to Spotify is to sell itself to a similarly large benefactor (e.g. Google / Facebook}.

We all know that iTunes revenues have been falling in the face of ...