Spotify Raises $526 Million As Apple Charges Into Streaming 72
An anonymous reader writes: Spotify has raised an enormous $526 million in funding to fight off Apple's new Apple Music subscription service. As part of the funding round, European carrier TeliaSonera is responsible for $115 million. The music service now has 20 million paying subscribers and 75 million monthly active users, doubling the subscriber base since May of 2014. The LA Times reports: "U.S. companies participating in the Spotify funding include Halcyon Asset Management, GSV Capital, D.E. Shaw & Co., Technology Crossover Ventures, Northzone and P. Schoenfeld Asset Management, said the person familiar with the matter, who was not authorized to comment publicly. British investment firms Baillie Gifford, Lansdowne Partners and Rinkelberg Capital, along with Canadian hedge funds Senvest Capital and Discovery Capital Management also took part. In a statement disclosing its investment, TeliaSonera said it would work with Spotify to come up with innovations in media distribution, customer insights, data analytics and advertising."
256 Million? (Score:2)
Techies trying to be techy with money raising?
526 Million? (Score:3, Funny)
Dyslexics trying to be dyslexy with article reading?
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HA!
Totally read it as 256.
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512 M + error correction
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Techies trying to be techy with money raising?
I've got a better solution. If Spotify could take care of this:
Spotify is currently not available in your country.
...then they wouldn't need to "raise" money, I would give it to them voluntarily.
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"They" need it? The musicians who want it, already have it. They'll sell you music. Buy it from them.
And if you simply must stream it, instead of playing it from local storage, then stream it from your file server.
Don't have a file server? Bad nerd!
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well you can download tracks for offline listening (i do this on my cell phone for conserving bandwidth)
You can also use audacity to make mp3's out of what you're listening to. But I somehow doubt spotify would approve of that use case.
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Hah, suckers! I listen to Grooveshark [grooveshark.com]!
competition is good but where does the money go? (Score:2)
I don't stream music except via internet radio, but I can see this as a good sign for upcoming competition. What I don't see will be any change for the small working musician in the pie. These are services to provide data and harvest data from users, not benevolent online record stores. I also like how Apple is reinventing Shoutcast but getting people to pay for it.
No thanks guys. Long live freeform, listener supported WFMU.
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you want money you have to play live. the era of living off royalties, reselling your music in new formats and greatest hits collections is over
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My brother is in an indie band that played rockfest kc this year {about 55k people attended} and toped at 41 on cmj chart. The money is in merchandising not digital sales or live events {although a lot of merch is sold at live events}. They sound successful but honestly can't afford to quit their day jobs.
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Merchandizing being the place bands get their money, has been true for as long as I can remember - Tours and live-gigs are simply a way to bring the merchandize to the buyers.
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Unless you have the power of commercial radio behind you and merchandise in every mall and record store, chances are your not making squat.
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Records are usually sold as a collectors item they can be very expensive to have cut, my brother is trying to find a good supplier that isn't going to break the bank.
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That would be the part you didn't understand, music isn't a hobby for a recording artist. What you have are indie artists putting in full time hours plus working a regular full time job, sometimes their regular job is related to music but most of them just have regular jobs. They travel and sometimes a show doesn't even cover their costs even though there are 1k people attending.
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That would be the part you didn't understand, music isn't a hobby for a recording artist.
Yes it is. They might try to convince you otherwise, but I'm a hobby musician, know people in bands etc Even managed to work at a few festivals for some big international acts, and have minor experience in a studio
A good musician can write and record a song in a week. Why should I pay royalties for 75 years for this amount of effort?
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if all you do is play some local festivals, events, bars, etc.. have a few t-shirts and a home studio recording you can even be loved locally but you are not the person I'm referring to.
I'm talking about the guys that write songs, record albums, do or commission cover art, merchandise designs, promotional art, music videos, have supply chains, promoters, and administrative overhead, tour for months at a time, do crap music blog interviews, internet radio shows, college and commercial radio shows, magazine i
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you want money you have to play live. the era of living off royalties, reselling your music in new formats and greatest hits collections is over
That era never existed for most artists, even large, well known ones. The money has always been in live shows, merch, and more recently licensing.
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They're going to pay off the music cartels to convince them to give Spotify a few more months of life before they cave in or get bought out, of course.
Half a billion dollars will satisfy the RIAA's greed for about 6 months.
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Don't forget royalties to copyright holders/labels (although not necessarily artists) -- that's the biggest chunk of expenditure.
Hasn't apple heard of pandora? (Score:2)
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Pandora = internet radio
Apple music = spotify = you rent and play whatever songs you want.
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Pandora = internet radio
Apple music = spotify = you rent and play whatever songs you want.
No. Apple music is a hybrid of four things:
1. rent/play whatever you want (like spotify
2. purchase whatever you want (like old school iTunes)
3. internet radio with an algorithmic dj (like pandora)
4. internet radio with a human dj (like old school radio)
It costs $10/month for the first item, $1 per song for the second one, and items 3 and 4 are free.
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Isn't (2) a waste of money if you already pay for (1)? It's like paying twice for the same song unless you plan to discontinue using Apple Music in the near future.
So (Score:2)
Spotify raises $526m. Apple as of earlier this year [theguardian.com] had $178b in cash reserves. Now obviously Apple isn't going to spend all it's reserves, but you're going to need a lot more than that money to win a fight against Apple.
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They also provide sdk for subscribers so you can write your own player if you want.
Itunes, it's probably one of the worst applications I've used. Platform support? One, more perhaps later..
Sdk so you can write your owwn app? Yeah no.
From technical standpoint, apple is hopelessly late to the game.
They could compete by undercutting pricing but this is apple we're talking about, profit before anything else.
I think
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Well it's hard to make it use standard os widgets and also be cross platform.
Spotify should be applauded for making a first class linux app. It really has almost every feature that the windows or mac apps have (even if that does leave it rather bloated)
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Well it's hard to make it use standard os widgets and also be cross platform.
last.fm did a great job half a decade ago using qt, they were multi platform with a decent app, having a somewhat native feeling everywhere.
It's not hard, it's more that everybody wants their app to special (it's particularly bad with commercial apps, and music related apps in general).
AmaroK didn't have success because it had a ton of unique features, but because they made a music player that wasn't designed for kids. Just think of winamp, designing a music player to look like an actual physical music pl
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I agree with all your points, but the big thing Apple has is that they will effectively be pushing this service to every iOS user, and after the free subscription period it is a simple 'buy' click and you're signed up. I think the lack of friction is going to get them a lot of customers very quickly.
As to whether they can compete on Android that will be very interesting. I think it will be hard for them as Android people (speaking anecdotally) can be quite polarised against Apple. This is probably the main
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Thing is. Apple doesn't care. This service can loose money and as long as it makes the iPhone more attractive to potential buyers it is worth it to them. Same with the new news app. I'm honestly shocked they didn't make the streaming service cheaper.
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Thing is. Apple doesn't care. This service can loose money and as long as it makes the iPhone more attractive to potential buyers it is worth it to them. Same with the new news app. I'm honestly shocked they didn't make the streaming service cheaper.
Why would they make it cheaper? They can sell expensive razor blade handles AND expensive razor blades.
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Spotify also works on the PS3. And Sonos. And on the $99 Android tablets that everyone got their kids a few years ago that were lousy for playing games, which are generally findable for free at this point, and often include an HDMI output (so the crappy built-in DACs aren't an issue).
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From technical standpoint, apple is hopelessly late to the game.
Sure, they have clients on a bunch of devices but spotify is still sorely lacking in many areas mostly which includes actually listening to their customers. Take explicit lyrics. Despite years of requests, they refuse to put a explicit filter which effectively excludes a huge chunk of family friendly and business friendly environments. To make matters worse, they can't even hit the other end of the market where a quick google search shows a large group of people who WANT to listen to explicit lyrics gett
Too late to entry (Score:1)
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I have amazon prime
I get free music already.
I don't think you understand what "free" means.
Perhaps they live in a civilized country where the universal human right to free music is recognized, and the government picks up the tab.
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I'm trying to figure out the benefits here. I have amazon prime so I get free music already. Sure I can't listen to the white album at work...
Why can't you? You don't even need Prime.
They have a web based player for songs in your library of purchased MP3 -- so if you bought the White Album in that format you could.
Do one thing and do it well (Score:2)
Likewise, stop fucking up the in
Plex Media Server (Score:2)
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Live365.. (Score:1)
Is Live365 dead after Pandora, Spotify, Apple streaming?
Just wondering if it makes any more sense to broadcast on Live365... I'm guessing not anymore
That's great ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple wants to kill all free music streaming. (Score:1)
Why Apple wants to end the era of free music streaming [businessinsider.com]
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Apple wants all the big music publishers to cease allowing any free streaming of music. Apple pushing music labels to kill free Spotify streaming ahead of Beats relaunch [theverge.com] Why Apple wants to end the era of free music streaming [businessinsider.com]
And again, like I asked (and was not answered) in the other thread in which you posted this screed yesterday:
Citation, please; or STFU, hater.
And no, a single blog quoting "multiple [unnamed] sources" doesn't count as a "citation". Nor does another article that quotes the blog that quotes "multiple sources". Someone has to actually stand up and say "Yes, I saw this, I heard this." Unnamed sources don't cut it. Especially when the Business Insider article you proffered seems to say that multiple entities
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You could ask your boss, but you're probably under NDA.
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You could ask your boss, but you're probably under NDA.
For what? I write Windows apps for a living nowadays. Used to do embedded development for decades. Whole embedded Dev. World sucks ass now. Never have done Mac or iOS development professionally.
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I sort of suspect that's where things will have to go anyway. Spotify is operating at a loss and "we'll make it up on volume" is one of the oldest lines in the book. .com bust books.
They either will have to drop the free tier entirely or restrict it to the point most people don't really want it unless they want to become another brand for the
Hahah idiots (Score:1)
So a company that has always lost large sums of money, is not getting any better at losing less money ... and has always depending on funding to just pay the rent ... raised a 0.5 billion dollars ... to go up against a company that has track record of doing things well and is so profitable it has like 700 billion dollars in the bank ...
BWAHAHAHAHAHA
Someone just lost have a billion dollars because Apple can do the same thing spotify does with that money ... and then do it another 1399 times while Spotify is
Spotify is losing money at its current streaming p (Score:2)
... while at the same time giving zero to artists, but intends to make it up on volume. Another $526 million from investors will enable it to build out still more volume while offering even less to artists. Why doesn't it just buy tulip futures on margin and have done with it?
What's spotify? (Score:1)
Starting a small business (Score:1)