
Spotify had a £16.66m loss in 2009 - barredo
http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/11/22/spotify-had-a-16-66m-loss-in-2009-a-rumoured-us-launch-is-now-imperative/
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daleharvey
Its depressing to see techcrunch's continuous berating of spotify, along with
it and the last.fm debacle its hard to think techcrunch dont have an anti euro
startup.

Spotify is a very young company that has managed to successfully enter a
market with the highest of barriers to entry, released a technically superb
application, and built up one of the most devoted fanbases I have ever seen.

Spotify are still young and they have masses of potential for revenue, I think
at this point they just have to have a free service because people dont
believe that a service this good could existe, I have a hard time explaining
spotify to people that havent used it not because its complicated, just
because they dont believe it can work like that.

~~~
swombat
_Its depressing to see techcrunch's continuous berating of spotify_

First of all, I don't see this article as berating spotify. The headline
(which is inconclusive at best, not a clear "berating") aside, the article is
quite positive about Spotify's stats and their potential over the next few
years.

 _along with it and the last.fm debacle its hard to think techcrunch dont have
an anti euro startup_

Secondly, this article is on TechCrunch EU, by Mike Butcher, which afaik had
nothing to do with the TechCrunch US, Arrington-led "last.fm debacle" if you
want to call it that. For anyone who knows Mike, it's hard to accuse him of
having an anti-euro startup stance. Mike is probably one of the most active
people in Europe when it comes to trying to convince everyone that Europe is a
great place for startups.

TC-EU organises events, gets people together, writes about them, and generally
does everything they can to help the european startup scene pick up.

~~~
daleharvey
To be fair I didnt check the author of the article, and I do agree that Mike
has been a really good job promoting and helping local startups.

But I didnt make this comment on the article in isolation, there is a long
list of techcrunch articles questioning spotify's viability ever since its
inception, its being held to a much higher standard than it should be, and as
as far as I can tell the only company really successfully getting any leverage
against record labels I think they should be backed at every opportunity.

------
frou_dh
The desktop application is crafty enough to have me consider subscribing: If
you lower your _OS-wide_ volume to 0 during a grating audio ad, the ad is
paused and resumes when you bump your volume up again.

Physically taking off your headphones to let ads run gets old! Perhaps the
discerning cheapskate puts an analogue volume dial in the chain.

~~~
pierrefar
Yes a very annoying app. Also consider that it _forces_ updates and that when
the app is running and you want to click on a list item, it suddenly inserts
an ad which you up clicking anyway.

They may think they have me by the balls, but they're not installed on my
computer any more.

Ironically, we were all outraged at this kind of behaviour in the late 90s
when it was called adware. Now, magically, it's a good thing.

~~~
ElliotH
Well the ads are there to support the unlimited free music they're giving you,
so you can't complain too much.

On the adware front - the app doesn't auto-run, doesn't self install, is easy
to uninstall and doesn't show ads when it isn't running. So it bares little
resemblance to the adware of the 90s.

With all that said though - I shouldn't imagine they care very much about
having non-paying customers 'by the balls' I would expect they care much more
about those that pay.

~~~
pierrefar
All good points.

My argument is based on user experience. Both spotify and the 90s adware are
on the wrong side of the line separating "understandably has ads" and
"annoyingly has ads". No doubt that spotify is closer to the line compared to
90s adware.

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jacquesm
Spotify is a great service but they are operating in a market where there is a
lot of pressure from all sides, much more so than in other markets.

I hope they survive because we certainly need something like spotify, but
after absorbing the 'Imeem' founders' advice from the start-up school talks I
came away with the viewpoint that spotify's future is anything but assured.

As for TC having an 'anti-euro-startup whatever', they report the news, they
don't actually make it. Either spotify has a loss or they haven't, don't shoot
the messenger. And I'm not exactly a TC fan.

~~~
ThomPete
TC don't just report the news. Sorry but there are plenty of examples of their
personal opinions creeping in.

Not that I have a problem with that but TC do like to play clairvoyants.

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ThomPete
Compared to so many other IMHO less serving startups receiving funding up the
yazoo it's hard to imagine spotify not being able to get the funding needed.

I have been using it ever since it was only out in beta and haven't looked
back ever since. Today iTunes is primarily used for iTU and Podcasts all other
music is played from Spotify which btw supports locally stored music and
actually have a social service that works.

~~~
estel
Their support for local music is still a bit second-rate, imo. Not least
because of its lack of codec support.

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erikstarck
Spotify Sweden is profitable. <http://martinweigert.com/spotify-is-profitable-
in-sweden>

Noteworthy because that's where it started and Sweden can be ahead of the
curve from the rest of Europe.

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jasonkester
Spotify did a great job of alienating me as a potential user. Here was my
experience:

\- heard of Spotify

\- went to Spotify.com, read something like "Download our thing and play all
this Free Music!"

\- downloaded their thing

\- opened their thing to find an iTunes clone. With no Free Music anywhere to
be found.

I spent the better part of 10 minutes trying to figure out how to get it to
find and play some of this Free Music before giving up.

I can only assume that most of their potential users are going through the
same thing. If so, it's not surprising that they're bleeding money so fast.

~~~
estel
Genuinely confused about what you're doing to get this experience. It's almost
all free; you just click and... it plays?

~~~
jasonkester
I don't know. It's been uninstalled for months.

I think they used to market it as "we'll find you all sorts of cool music", so
the expectation I had was that I'd be able to type in an artist or song and it
would run an iTunes-esque "Genius" on it to give you a playlist.

Instead, I'd type in an artist or song and it would come back with no results.

It was happy to play music that I already had on my machine, but seemingly had
no capability to go out and find new music from the internet. Given that that
was its stated purpose, I was annoyed and uninstalled it.

~~~
Stuk
Then I'm afraid you must have missed something. If, for example (as it was the
first net screenshot I found) you enter "bella" into the top left search box,
you get back this:
[http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/files/2009/08/spotify_deskto...](http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/files/2009/08/spotify_desktop_client.png)

Double click any of those and it will instantly start streaming the song.

~~~
jasonkester
Indeed, that's what I was expecting to see. Now imagine you'd typed "bella"
and you saw an empty list. That was Spotify when I gave them a shot.

I might have to try again at some point.

~~~
Waywocket
It's probably worth giving it a go but unless you have very mainstream musical
tastes, expect to be at least somewhat disappointed.

Their catalogue isn't too bad for a free service (probably around 40% of what
I search for comes up with useful results) although having to listen to
adverts every four songs seems a bit much, and it's certainly not worth paying
to get rid of them.

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Tycho
Yeah but how much money was _not_ spent on music because people could just
listen to it on Spotify. That's what I'd like to know (if it were possible)

~~~
eru
> because people could just listen to it on Spotify.

And Youtube, or the radio!

