Spotify Expands To 80 New Markets, Targeting 1 Billion Customers (bloomberg.com) 25
Spotify is introducing its audio service in 80 markets across Asia, Africa and the Caribbean in coming days, expanding the company's potential market by some 1 billion people. From a report: The steps announced Monday will nearly double Spotify's geographic footprint and add regions where streaming music is in its infancy. The company already operates in 93 countries or territories. Spotify is seeking to build on its head start as the leading audio service in the West to become the dominant player globally. While the company already has more than 345 million users, fewer than 20% come from Asia, Africa and the Middle East, where most of the world's people live. The Stockholm-based company has been slower to expand globally than Netflix or Google's YouTube, partly because of the complexity of securing music rights. But its timing coincides with growing potential in markets across Africa and Asia. Where the music industry was once U.S.-centric, many of the most popular acts in the world right now hail from India, Nigeria, South Korea and Latin America.
Languages (Score:3)
It could be targeting 7.8 billion customers (Score:3)
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Care to name these popular songs? I have never heard a song get popular from Nigeria or India. South Korea had that Gangnam Style song but that was years ago. Latin America .. hmm that Despacito song? Also years ago.
K-pop is, for some reason I can't fathom[1], a global phenomenon these days with bands like BTS. India is a huge market and has a large diaspora, and the music goes hand in hand with Bollywood.
[1] Same goes for rap and hip hop. Get off my lawn!
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That speaks to how large the music markets in those countries are, not how widely their artists and songs are outside their home markets. There was a time when the US and EU markets were all that mattered. Now, while still massively influential, they're being challenged (at least in size) by other music markets.
US and British R&B has had some collaboration with Nigerian artists. Beyonce recorded an album with almost every song featuring an African (normally Nigerian) artist. Sam Smith recorded a duet wi
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You won't have heard any more than the top of the top - both of those you cited hit #1 on YouTube and Billboard respectively. But being the top of the top isn't as important as it used to be. The long tail has grown at the expense of the top, and it's where you'll find the most percentage growth. It's where the K-pop, Latin pop, and Afrobeats phenomenons live. It's where millions of people's streaming filter bubble takes them, while your bubble takes you somewhere else. It's a direct result of people paying
You misspelled "victims" (Score:2)
Of fraud, theft, robbery, usury, however you wanna name it when somebody takes money for doing nothing, while acting like he worked hard and you're a thief for not letting him steal from you.
It's literally the perfect crime. Printing money is for noobs. Pros make *other* push the copy button for him!
Just watch it come in,
tmade 'em all po',
make that line thin,
and snort some mo'.
Thank the gods (Score:2)
I'm old and still rely on Soulseek
Mergers to create bundled offerings (Score:2)
I wonder if we'll see a merger of Spotify with Netflix at some point to try to offer bundled Music & TV to compete with the likes of Apple's "One" package?
Also I recently found myself wondering where DropBox saw its future?
Digital subscription bundling may force surprise allegiances in the not too distant future.
Non covered countries? (Score:2)
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Remind me, where is Spotify based?
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HQ still in Stockholm but it's on NY stock exchange and Tencent own some of the stocks?
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Remastered (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm about to cancel spotify because they make it hard to find original songs. They present me with 'remastered' songs which often sound quite different to (worse than) the original. I presume they get some kind of financial benefit from this, or they would show originals first
If I search for "beatles let it be" I get 6 results all of which are 'remastered'. Most remastered results are not even 'official' remasters released by the band/label, but something done by spotify or by grifters
Re: Remastered (Score:3)
Remastering is usually mostly just a reduction in the dynamic range of the audio, also known as compression. Sometimes an engineer will have access to the original studio masters and sometimes not, so it's not a very useful term. I'm more interested in wether the audio is lossfully compressed (note the potential for confusion) in the data realm. 320kbps is pretty much unnoticeable in most listening environments and to older ears, but less than that is a compromise.
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Remastering is usually mostly just a reduction in the dynamic range of the audio, also known as compression. Sometimes an engineer will have access to the original studio masters and sometimes not, so it's not a very useful term. I'm more interested in wether the audio is lossfully compressed (note the potential for confusion) in the data realm. 320kbps is pretty much unnoticeable in most listening environments and to older ears, but less than that is a compromise.
Remastering can be many things. Sometimes, it's a shot in Loudness war [wikipedia.org]. Other times, it's trying to get the best out of old tapes... maybe correcting earlier bad conversions. An example here is the Beatles remasters [soundonsound.com], which are great.
As for "lossfully compressed" and "..., but less than that is a compromise" - note that Spotify also announced they will be launching Spotify HiFi [spotify.com] later this year.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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It's entirely likely they are all official releases. Most of the Beatles' catalog has at least 3 or 4 official digital releases:
(1) The original CD remasters from the 80s (sold well into the 2000s) that were not bad, but a bit lifeless.
(2) The 2009 remasters, taking advantage of the better analog-to-digital converters that became available, and some very mild EQing. These will go down in history as the "definitive" digital versions, they're the ones you want.
(3) The 2017-2018 remixes of some of the latter a
Internet services require infrastructure (Score:2)
How many will use it? (Score:2)