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Music Businesses

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.
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Spotify Expands To 80 New Markets, Targeting 1 Billion Customers

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  • by Pop69 ( 700500 ) <billy@bena r t y . c o . uk> on Monday February 22, 2021 @05:17PM (#61091314) Homepage
    But they still can't manage to have Scots listed as a language to upload stuff in ?
  • by xack ( 5304745 ) on Monday February 22, 2021 @05:17PM (#61091316)
    If copyright extremists didn’t artificially restrict based on region.
  • 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'.

  • I'm old and still rely on Soulseek

  • 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.

  • Assuming "market" means "sovereign country", they will be present in 80+93=173 countries. UN has 193 members, which means Spotify will be absent from 20 countries. Which ones? 20 is more than the list of US embargoed countries.
    • 20 is more than the list of US embargoed countries.

      Remind me, where is Spotify based?

      • by aliquis ( 678370 )

        HQ still in Stockholm but it's on NY stock exchange and Tencent own some of the stocks?

      • US has been considering that some of its laws are can be enforced anywhere in the world.Have you noticed how they convinced European companies to get out of Iran?
  • Remastered (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Blame The Network ( 5533826 ) on Monday February 22, 2021 @08:16PM (#61091710)

    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

    • 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.

      • by teg ( 97890 )

        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.

    • They present me with 'remastered' songs which often sound quite different to (worse than) the original.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • 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

  • Affordable, high-speed internet service is not ubiquitous across all markets. In these markets, it makes more sense for users to buy a digital copy of a track once and download it once instead of incurring fees by streaming the same song repeatedly ad infinitum. Spotify's market share will still expand but these new markets aren't going to consume the same way other markets do.
  • I don't mean to sound disrespectful to people in those countries but it doesn't seem they're the countries with the most power of purchase. I live in a developed country and I don't know a single person that pays for a Spotify subscription (many do use the free-with-ads optionn though), so I don't know how many people in these newly supported areas can even afford to pay for Spotify or even a smartphone and a plan that supports the kind of data needed for streaming

He who has but four and spends five has no need for a wallet.

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