How Spotify Can Become Profitable 167
journovampire writes: Spotify just posted another big net loss, but it can become profitable with some specific changes according to one analyst. He suggests the following three options: Cut royalty costs to the music industry, freeze expenditure year-on-year, and what seems like the least likely option, somehow make free users pay $1 every three months. He points out: "if Spotify’s current free user base just paid €1/£1/$1 every three months, it would be a profitable company."
Who Cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
If investors have been dumb enough to prop up the company for this long without seeing any sort of profit (and instead, big fat losses) why should I be worried about whether or not it can turn the tables? The worst that can happen is the service gradually winding down before the name is sold off to some other schlubs who will either:
A - repeat the mistake and run their own version of it at a loss
B - change some shit and run their own, slightly worse (for users) version of it at a mild profit
C - change a lot of shit and kill it in the same way Napster was killed
D - sit on it and do nothing
In A and B, users win.
In C and D, users lose until a new copycat (or 5) come along and get the same idiot investors to buy in and keep it running for free (to users) and at a loss (to investors) for years to come.
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Who are the investors in this company? Oh yes, the record industry. They keep making money from the high royalty costs, and can at the same time point at the Spotify bottom line and say "look, streaming isn't profitable, we have to go back to the good ol' business model of sales and DRM, THINK OF THE MUSICIANS!"
It's great when you have contracts with your musicians which enable you to have your cake, eat it, and then claim a part of their cake too to cover expenses of your cake eating.
If... (Score:2, Insightful)
If everybody in my country gave me just five cents per year, I'd be rich. What does that prove?
"Cut royalty costs to the music industry," (Score:1)
And that's a non-starter right there.
$1 a month (Score:5, Insightful)
it sounds cheap and easy for people to pay $1 a month, but personally there is a large bump in commitment as soon as I submit my monetary information. This often keeps me from doing still fairly inexpensive things because I don't want that commitment
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$1 every 3 months. You have commitment issues over $4?
Re:$1 a month (Score:5, Interesting)
$1 every 3 months. You have commitment issues over $4?
There is something about recurring expenses... that people don't like... :)
Now if they decided only to sell it as $50 and then you get spotify for 10 years... with no binding or recurring expenses people might bite
Note, I pay for spotify, but I bought it in Denmark even though it's $20/mo, because the European selection is much better than the US selection (I live in US).
Re:$1 a month (Score:4, Insightful)
Recurring expenses don't bother me. Trusting a company like Spotify to handle them securely and professionally however does. To many of these companies consider secure handling of your details as something that is distant second in importance to actually getting your money. Recurring payments mean long term trust, I simply don't have that in such a company.
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My commitment issue is giving out credit card info, I don't by free stuff of sites want my credit card information, to make the purchase either.
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this is what I was talking about. It isn't even the direct cost that bugs me, just the fact that I am handing out sensitive information
Re:$1 a month (Score:4, Interesting)
The endless list of horror stories of subscription cancellation woes has built up a very real online resistance to signing up for anything with a credit card. Even free as they often are a hidden free trial.
Having had the honor of first hand dealing with online ordering without just as easy online cancellation, has firmly entrenched the once burned twice shy response.
I can name names to be specific.
AOL, Comcast, Viatalk...
Until the industry fixes the locked in reoccuring billing subscription, all sign up proceedures no matter how small are potential fights in the future to cancell, and customers are burnt out dealing with it.
Guilt by association appplies to any service without a contract expiration date.
For spotify to leave the reputation, they should offer term subscriptions. 1 month, 3 month, & 1 year. No questions termination at end of contract. Then provide excellent service so I'll renew because they are great.
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Have you ever tried to work with their customer service over a dispute?
I would pay $1 a month (Score:3)
I would pay $1 a month to upgrade my account. The $11 is too much. I would prefer just keep Netflix streaming and listen to background music and dialog. I did the 3 month thing or 99 cents the time before last that it was offered, but they only allow you to do that once. My option was to create another account and pay the 99 cents or just continue as a free user. I choose to stay a free user, as it doesn't really bother me. To me, it just says they pushed away a potential paying member, who is not willing to pay the price they are asking, but would be willing to pay another price. If spotify gets rid of the free tier, I would leave it. Even if I were a premium paying member.
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And that's the problem with services like this. You don't really need that much music. 50 years ago people heard songs on the radio from time to time and were happy. I have enough good music stored on my HDD (most of it ripped off of CDs I bought) that I don't really need more.
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Oh there's absolutely a market for people like you. It's just a small one. For everyone else, $10/mo. could easily be spent buying new and used CD's and building a collection of hundreds of CD's (and the corresponding digital rips) for less money. It's part of why Spotify is going to have a hard time attracting enough of an audience to a high monthly price tag.
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You bring up an interesting point. Streaming movies, which is exponentially more expensive from production through distribution, is a cheaper subscription than a music streaming service. And then there's the fact that a lot of Netflix films have music in them too. That suggests their price is really too high.
This must be... (Score:5, Funny)
Are you joking? (Score:2, Funny)
How to become profitable: charge for free service. The mind boggles.
Pay the musicians even less?!?! (Score:2, Interesting)
Cut royalty costs to the music industry
Given the constant bad press that Spotify gets about how little money artists get from their work being streamed on Spotify, how does the analyst expect them to be able to get away with paying the source of their content less?
Re:Pay the musicians even less?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
...except the problem with all of that is this is being driven by idiot savant musicians that don't understand that there's a money grubbing middle man in between them and Spotify. What the artist gets and what Spotify actually pays are two different things.
And that's not even getting into the problem of assigning a reasonable value to a single impression.
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At this point in history, I don't have much sympathy for musicians who complain about their lack of wealth.
Musicians who have risen to any kind of popularity in the last 10 years ought to be well aware of the greedy "recording industry" and its money grubbing ways. I'm pretty sure it's been common knowledge for the last 30 years.
I don't know why popular artists don't try to structure their income around self-production and distribution and making money off touring and reduce their exposure to the record la
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Re:Pay the musicians even less?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to "right holders", but to artists.
Limit copyrights on recorded music to 25 years and don't let them be assignable to anyone but the artist (maybe a spouse). Not children, not publishing companies, not record labels.
If I listen to Charlie Parker records, why should I be paying license fees to anyone? Every single person associated with that recording and the music therein is dead. Earlier tonight, I was listening to Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Al Haig's recording of "Shaw 'Nuff" which was recorded 70 years ago today. Why shouldn't that entire recording be in the public domain? I'll pay a company to stream it, no problem. But why should any "rights" money change hands?
https://youtu.be/1IuZNbdwAk8 [youtu.be]
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I pay ~USD$70/year for ad-free on Live365. It's a service I'm 98% happy with; some stations have started to "offer premium products of interest to our listeners" - I mean, if I wanted to know about organic skin care cream, I'd look it up. I really don't see the link between organic skin cream and celtic music. I pay so I don't have to listen to ads, and those stations that start advertising anything beyond CDs or digital downloads quickly lose their place in my "favourites" list.
I've even told them I'd pay
What do all bad plans have in common? (Score:1)
They all start with the words, "If only..."
Laugh (Score:1)
Proving what I have always said, musicians get paid too much and music isn't worth a dollar a song.
Closer to .05$ a song or less.
Now if we can just keep them out of politics....
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musicians get paid too much and music isn't worth a dollar a song.
For the junk that gets massively popular, yes that's true. That's why they need to sell millions of copies and let their labels reap in most of the profits. There are better musicians out there, but since they keep most of their $1/song and don't need to spend crazy amounts of money advertising, they're happy to remain relatively obscure.
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Who said anything about being a millionaire? I'm talking about the artists who are making $1/song and are happy with only selling 10's of thousands per year. These are the ones who don't just play music, they write it. They create art and culture.
Pop music where the artist gets 5 cents per download are the ones who become millionaires. And they don't deserve it any more than the label that puts the crap out. I never even tried to equate them.
WTF? (Score:4, Informative)
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H1B music (Score:2)
Someone is doing something really wrong (Score:3)
Music with the occasional advertisement. Isn't that exactly what traditional radio has been doing for the past decades? Playing music for people to enjoy (broadcast for free), usually with some talk in between by a dj announcing the songs, telling funny things, doing interviews, etc. And most of those radio stations managed to make a decent profit out of it.
Here we have Spotify, doing effectively the same but broadcasting on the Internet rather than the airwaves. Playing music interspersed with advertisements, broadcast for free for anyone who wants to tune in to.
Radio stations have an expensive, power hungry transmitter to pay for. Spotify just needs an Internet connection (I suspect this to be cheaper).
Radio stations are hiring DJs, the more popular ones demanding high salaries. Spotify doesn't have DJs.
Radio stations have to maintain a studio building for the DJs and other staff to do their work. Spotify just an office and a rack in a data centre.
Radio stations are usually limited to a relatively small geographic reach due to the physics of radio waves. The Internet has no boundaries. Larger reach means more potential value for advertisers.
From the face of it, Spotify has many advantages compared to traditional radio stations. Lower overhead, larger potential audience so more advertising revenues. So how is it that Spotify can't keep up? Is the competition of traditional radio really so strong?
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Radio stations are usually limited to a relatively small geographic reach due to the physics of radio waves. The Internet has no boundaries. Larger reach means more potential value for advertisers.
I have to disagree with that one; I doubt that this is an advantage. I think that small geographic reach can be an advantage if the region is sufficiently populated.
I haven't listened to a lot of radio in years, but when I did, there were lots of adverts by local businesses or the regional branches of bigger chains; you don't have e.g Ford advertising how awesome their new trucks are, you have some car dealership with a couple of local branches promoting zero interest payment plans.
I don't think there
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Valid point.
OTOH, the Internet - and the fact that this kind of services are streamed with separate streams to every listener - allows for targeting by location. Just like the good old Google AdWords allows local entrepreneurs to advertise to local customers.
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I haven't used Spotify indeed, but I have been working for a traditional radio station so I know quite a bit about that side. It's for me simply hard to believe that Spotify would need more staff than a regular station based on number of listeners, considering so much is automated.
free user base just paid â1/£1/$1 (Score:3)
Spotify is irritating (Score:3)
I listen to the free version of Spotify once in a while, but it's fundamentally irritating. They have commercials, and that would be fine (since it's free), but the only commercials they have are 2-3 Spotify commercials that they repeat over-and-over-and-over, telling me I need to upgrade to get rid of the commercials.
In other words, they can't sell their advertising, at least not in Switzerland. But they don't want the non-paying user to have an uninterrupted experience, so they put in their own interruptions. The result is just irritating, and that's why I don't listen to Spotify very often.
Lastly, I find their prices kind of high. As someone who listens to music maybe once a week, I just don't see paying $15/month for the privilege. If they have a problem with too many people not buying their premium service, maybe that's because it's overpriced for the typical user.
Why care (Score:2)
So, another attempt to get rich on music falls flat on it's face, burning it;s investors arses in the process. And why should anyone care? If we believe the bullshitters, the entire music industry needs to die so that people can pay musicians directly, instead of letting the money be stolen by the music industry.
Well, that'll be great. And if the music industry goes down the shitter and takes the musicians with it, who's goin
Re:It not very hard (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean charge everyone $5 per month, because changing a free service to a paid one could well cut the user base by a factor of 15.
Re:It not very hard (Score:5, Interesting)
you know, you're right, but I think it's for the best. Spotify's current approach is unsustainable, not only for themselves but also for musicians, labels, and the music industry. we all shake our fists at music labels, but I for one want a thriving industry where musicians and labels make money so they're incentivized to make more music.
Re: It not very hard (Score:1)
That's easy. Just buy their albums. Now if only the industry would abandon the crazy import CD pricing I could patronize some great artists who's music I'd like to own a copy of.
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Musicians never got money from album sales. A sliver get allocated to them, and taken away again to repay the advance which the label gave them to make the album.
Buying concert tickets and merchandise, IIRC, is where they earn money.
Re: It not very hard (Score:5, Informative)
Musicians never got money from album sales. A sliver get allocated to them, and taken away again to repay the advance which the label gave them to make the album.
It entirely depends on the band, their contract, and how much they sell. The Beatles made massive piles of money even though they stopped touring halfway through their career, and the Pink Floyd "The Wall" album saved the band's members from bankruptcy while the following tour lost them all money. You can read about the structure of traditional music industry royalties here [howstuffworks.com].
The short version is that on a CD sale, artists might make a 10% royalty after packaging, breakage, marketing and costs of production (advance) are subtracted. The above linked article shows how quickly that 10% shrinks, as well. Digital play royalties - unless the band is savvy and has negotiated better rates - are about half of the CD rate.
However, if you wrote the song that was performed, you will see an additional cut. And the band also gets royalties each time the song is played on the radio, or used on TV or in the movies (the writer gets an even bigger cut). So ultimately, there is still a lot of money to be made in recorded music, not just concerts and merchandise... but your music has to be popular enough to appear on the radio or other media for you to cash in. For indie bands, concerts and merchandise will be the big moneymakers of course, but they never sold much recorded music anyway.
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The Beatles and Pink Floyd are extreme examples from the top 1% of the music industry, and neither are even active in today's music industry.
It's like arguing that the lotto is a good way to become rich because Mr. X won the lotto in 1981, and Ms. Y won it in 1994.
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For an argument that's valid today - a band that does its own marketing can completely rid themselves of their label now. They can sell physical CD's on-demand via Amazon CreateSpace, digital MP3 via iTunes/Amazon, streaming via Spotify/Pandora. They can book their own live gigs. And none of that requires a record label. And more and more independent artists are doing just that and making a decent living with far less success than is required with a label taking a cut. And fans are more empowered than
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But lone examples, or a dozen or a hundred bands being able to afford mansions doesn't mean that an industry supports musicians.
The majority get almost nothing. Most give up early. Others struggle on a low income until their talent fades somewhat and then they give up.
If I said something was impossible, then a lone example would suffice to prove me wrong, but I'm not saying it's impossible to make money from selling CDs. I'm saying it's rare in the current system.
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Most don't need to get rich to be happy. For some, struggling with low income doing what they love is better than holding a regular job.
But really, it's like starting any small business. A large number of them fail. And you have to be entering a market that has room for you. It's about making a living and not getting rich or famous.
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They mightn't be in it for the money, but fair is fair. There's a lot of money in the music industry, but way too much is going into marketing a small selection of CDs and funding a showcase lifestyle for a small number of musicians. There must be a model that creates fewer millionaires but gives more musicians a sufficient wage so they don't give up or end up broke and washed up by 40.
Re:It not very hard (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm still trying to figure out how collecting royalties on songs where everyone is dead is going to incentivize them to make more music. Maybe we should reconsider these rules giving copyright to corporations for 200 years.
Re:It not very hard (Score:5, Insightful)
So, when I die, can I still have the company I work for continue to pay my family for the work I did when I was alive?
Copyright laws that extend beyond the death of the artist are an abomination.
If "music corporations" stop pouring "millions" into a rising star, nothing of value will be lost. It doesn't cost "millions" to make and release a recording any more. Those days are long gone.
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Sure, is your work copyrighted and do you own the rights to your work (i.e. not sold to employer in a work-for-hire contract)?
When you eat a meal at a restaurant, it stops providing benefit to you or anyone once you've consumed the meal. OTOH, a copyrighted work keeps providing benefits to its users for many years o
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The fact that those descendants had absolutely nothing to do with creating the book?
You have that exactly backwards. Copyright is not some natural right. Copyright is entirely a creation of government. It does not exist in nature. It
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Neither did the descendents who inherited their parents' farms, mansions, condos, hotels, businesses, savings accounts, investments, expensive cars etc. So just like out-of-copyright books, I want all those assets freely distributed to everyone in the country, equally, upon death of the owner.
That's backwards. Copyright is just a legal embodiment of what is natural right -- creator of int
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Farms and other businesses have great upkeep costs which must be exceeded by their useful output in order to turn a profit. All investments collapse; hard assets do not draw upon the economy to divert wealth, but rather maintain or decay in wealth. All of these things either bring no cost to society or provide a continuing useful output; by contrast, music, movies, and books exist, and can be copied--the service of copying creates a good, while the fact of existing creates nothing.
A farmer who holds but
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No, greedy moron, I'm not talking about patentable IP (creating fire, wheels etc.) but copyrightable IP (paintings, music, books, movies etc.). Copyrighted IP can passed down to generations like the so-called real assets without causing hardship to people trying to use technology like wheel or fire. I call them "so-called real," because they are a mixture of cheap minerals from earth combined with expensive, patentable and copyrighted IP to form your so-called real assets.
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BTW, you still haven't answered what the descendents of the "real property" did to take ownership of it after the death of the property's owner.
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But there are plenty of efficient farmers and businessmen who are more capable of maintaining these real properties than the (often inexperienced) descendents of the previous owner. So, why pass these properties down to the descendents?
Copyrighted works too maintain and decay in wealth gene
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there are plenty of efficient farmers and businessmen who are more capable of maintaining these real properties than the (often inexperienced) descendents of the previous owner. So, why pass these properties down to the descendents?
A farmer may work a farm or sell the land, depending on if he is skilled enough to turn profitable output from the land. In the same way, a musician may play his instruments or sell them on eBay.
Copyrighted works too maintain and decay in wealth generation after their prime years. So, not very different. Yet it is redistributed.
Ah, but a copyrighted work can be altered, performed, incorporated, built upon. It can be used as a limitless foundation for new works. In this it is not consumed as land or metal, but multiplied and expanded as knowledge; for the exercise of earth and steel leaves you with less of each, but the exercise of kno
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Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Dickens works have been public domain for quite some time. What economic benefits have been gained so far? Nothing, other than getting those works for free.
I fail to see how paying for art weakens culture. It should strengthen it instead. As far as destroying wealth, no one became poor spending a few hundred dollars a year.
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Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Dickens works have been public domain for quite some time. What economic benefits have been gained so far? Nothing, other than getting those works for free.
Bullshit, people have been sampling and remixing public domain works for years and have created new works of value. To say the public domain has no economic benefit for new creators is terribly short-sighted.
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Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Dickens works have been public domain for quite some time. What economic benefits have been gained so far? Nothing, other than getting those works for free.
And having received these for free, others now have money with which to buy other, similar, newer works, fueling the great machine of creativity, yes?
Or we could use the creative argument that Wagner [youtube.com] is in public domain, and now others have created works upon works [youtube.com].
I fail to see how paying for art weakens culture.
It makes a good which one may duplicate by his own effort into a good which one is not allowed to, creating an artificial scarcity, a constriction, and a high barrier to committing certain profitable acts. Consider that the great realm of fa
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The majority of such works are inconsequential since such things are done mostly by less creative artists.
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Copyright laws that extend beyond the death of the artist are an abomination.
Generally, I would agree if you were to amend your statement to include "beyond the death of the artist and the age of majority for their children." If you had, for example, an artist in their 20s or 30s with young kids who died accidentally, it would make sense to use the artist's posthumous earnings to complete the financial obligation he had to his children.
I have a friend under exactly that circumstance. Her spouse died accidentally shortly after their twin daughters were born. His royalties continue
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So, when I die, can I still have the company I work for continue to pay my family for the work I did when I was alive?
Copyright laws that extend beyond the death of the artist are an abomination.
No, but the money that you were already paid does go to your family. Your company will also pay your family for your unused vacation time (at least this is true when you leave or are fired, so I assume it's true if you die unexpectedly). The term is "deferred compensation", and that's what royalties are.
Copyright terms that automatically expire at the death of the artist are what would be completely unfair. In addition to the danger of a young artist dying unexpectedly, as another poster described above,
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So, without copyright protection Beethoven would never have produced his Late Quartets?
Please. If you want government to subsidize artists, then let them subsidize artists. Creating laws only to create eternal income streams for artists and never allowing their work to enter the public domain is dishonest and counter-productive. It hurts culture and ultimately hurts artists.
I say this as someone whose income is dependent on m
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So, when I die, can I still have the company I work for continue to pay my family for the work I did when I was alive?
Have you heard of Social Security? It's like that, but for rich people.
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120 years, 200 years does it matter? Nothing is going to come out from under copyright until we're all dead.
I am a strong advocate of 20 year automatic copyright, then allowing the purchase of 20 year extensions for escalating renewal fees. Years 20-40 could be $1000 and then 10x for each successive renewal. This simple change would completely fix the orphan work problem and put millions of less popular works into the public domain. But the copyright industry doesn't want that to happen - they don't want th
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i really agree with the 1st point. i'm not a fan of the 2nd but it's true.
my wife's father was a composer, conductor and a music professor who married very late in his life. last 10 years of his life were pretty much so his wife and daughter can be supported by royalties from his work after his death. while the yearly cheques don't bring any breathtaking sum (it's mostly classical and jazz music), it was enough to make sure his wife could stay at home to bring up his daughter and enough to put his daughter
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Jefferson said inheritance was unnatural; but Jefferson was a hyper-liberal ass leaning toward Social Democrat. He believed a man's death should mark the right of the state to take all his stuff. All. Some much more moderate folks (FDR, who was also supremely liberal, but nowhere near Jefferson's game) proposed we take a percentage as inheritance (the Death Tax or Estate Tax), and an increasingly large percentage as the size of the estate grew.
In any case, I think the inheritance thing is a sham argumen
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Maybe it's a UK thing, but I can sign up a new account without a facebook account.
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$5 per month would be perfect, IMHO. Worth getting rid of the ads...
10€ on the other hand (there's no half-price student package here in Germany) is too much - I have a huge music collection that I'm still actively adding to, so theoretically I don't actually *need* Spotify, especially at home. Sure, I could afford 10€ a month, but I'd prefer to spend that on extra beer...
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Free without ads would be 'perfect' but it doesn't mean it is a viable business model.
If they roughly half the cost, then they would need to more than double the number of paying customers just to stay where they are. I'm sure if they thought they could make more money by lowering the price they would.
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I can't help but wonder how many others there are like me though. If there's a ton, dropping the free w/ ads tier and setting the premium price to $5/5€ would probably quadruple the number of subscribers over night... It's the carrot and the stick :p
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if userbase goes down, then the costs go down as well.
the real problem is that the ADS are not paying spotify enough to cover the plays of the free users. however, I suspect the calculation is such that the free users would need to pay 0.33 dollars / month and still have to listen to ads.
that would make the ads have more worth though, they could charge more per ad.
the real problem for them in that is that people would just rather listen to the music from youtube than pay 0.33$ / month - just like they're al
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If it's a fraudulent charge, contact your card issuer to reverse the charge.
If they get enough of them, their processing fees will increase. If they keep getting more, visa/mastercard/etc will refuse to do business with them.
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Add a nice new feature.
Charge $1 per month to use it (or $0.33, if that's all they need).
Profit.
How do you collect $1 a month from each user? The problem isn't so much that people don't want to pay. Most people wouldn't mind paying $1 a month, but will not pay $12 once a year. Yes, that makes no sense, since it's the same amount of money, but that's how people are.
So how do you charge people $1 a month? The real problem is that there is no easy, simple way to charge people a small amount of money.
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Charge people $5 every 4 months (yes, the math is a bit different). Lots of things are paid by the quarter.
You do have a good point though, micro transactions have just never taken off and this would be a good use for it.
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Charge people $5 every 4 months (yes, the math is a bit different). Lots of things are paid by the quarter.
Yes, the math must be a bit different if you think 4 months is a quarter of 12 months.
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That's not completely true. Millions of people around the world paying small amounts of money for iOS apps shows that it can be done. Additionally, I signed up for a $1.29/month charge for an extra 20G of iCloud storage, and it was extremely easy.
If Apple can figure it out, why can't spotify? Or is the 'enter your credit card' details step the part that you indirectly refer to as difficult? If so, then sure, there's no easy way of charging people a small amount of money without requiring and storing credit
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I pay for Spotify through PayPal. Spotify doesn't get my credit card numbers.
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Wait...so you trust Paypal more than...anyone? I suppose it's not so bad if you're paying with it as opposed to accepting payments through them, but they're far from innocent.
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No, but by using PayPal, I limit my exposure to one point, instead of giving my credit card info to every service I use. Steam, Spotify, etc all get paid through PayPal.
I realize PayPal isn't innocent, but at least it's not Apple Pay.
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You also lose the ability to easily do a standard chargeback since you're dealing with a middleman for your payments.
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> Millions of people around the world paying small amounts of money for iOS apps
Mostly, it shows that it can't be done. Most of them go bankrupt as soon as they try to scale beyond a few intrigued users.
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Most people wouldn't mind paying $1 a month, but will not pay $12 once a year. Yes, that makes no sense, since it's the same amount of money, but that's how people are.
And I could pay my mortgage in an annual payment 12x what I normally pay. It's the same amount of money. Good budgeting is just simpler if everything is in monthly installments. I hate that my local city only charges utilities once every 2 months. I budget my car insurance by putting $x aside each month into a special account so that I don't have to pay in a lump sum.
How do you collect $1/mo. per user? The fees for individual transactions are mostly percentage-based anyway - especially if you're doing
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I didn't think the government bought data. I thought they demanded it.
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Yes, the "Free Barrier" is a very hard one to break, although it does happen on occasion.
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Tell that to the record labels and the agencies that collect royalties in different countries. THEY are the ones requiring the geo-fencing and different pricing for different countries.
If you try to negotiate rights to sell or play any music, you will soon start wondering if the record label wants your money or not, because it will seem like they don't. It does not even matter if you are part of the same company group as a the record label you are negotiating with. Been there, done that.
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Granted, it has been nearly ten years since I was involved in creating an online music store. But it appears that mechanical licenses still do not grant rights to display album art to consumers, even if the two standard agreements I have seen appear to cover online distribution, at least for download services.
Note that the radio station agreements are very different from the online/internet/mobile agreements.
They already have a paid version... (Score:2)
You can already pay £10/month for ad-free, higher bitrate and the removal of a few other hurdles/restrictions on the free version. I think the problem is that's a bit too high a regular outgoing for light/infrequent users, or if you need more than one service. How about a 'pay as you go' option with x hours of listening for a few quid?
Also, selling advertising can't be working very well: the vast majority of the ads are for Spotify.
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It's not only too high, it doesn't account for the other use-cases people have for Spotify. Want to listen to an album before you buy it? Spotify free. And if I like the album, I'd rather buy it or the tracks I like than pay a monthly fee. Because why pay monthly for something you can have in perpetuity. Even though a lot of people use Photoshop and Microsoft Office, a lot of others (me included) will never buy again because of the lack of a truly standalone product. Let me decide when to pay money ag
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It's not only too high, it doesn't account for the other use-cases people have for Spotify. Want to listen to an album before you buy it? Spotify free.
Yup - have to admit that's the way I often use it. At one point, they had some sort of hook-up with an online store so you could buy albums. Presumably, that didn't work out.
However, there's plenty of other albums/artists that I might get the urge to listen to occasionally but don't feel the need to own for perpetuity - I'd probably pay a couple of quid a month for ad-free access to a bottomless library, but not £10, which is far more than my average monthly music spend.
Even though a lot of people use Photoshop and Microsoft Office, a lot of others (me included) will never buy again because of the lack of a truly standalone product.
I'm not sure that compares - y
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The bands that let their music be on spoitfy are saying "here have our music for free dear listener"
I'm not saying that they are raking in tons of money, but they're not giving it away for free either. Otherwise, Spotify might be somewhat profitable.