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Spotify Raises $526 Million As Apple Charges Into Streaming
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."
Dyslexics trying to be dyslexy with article reading?
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.
... perhaps now they can hire at least one person to work on the many long-standing issues with their interface. It shouldn't be too difficult; media players all the way back to the original Winamp had features that Spotify is still lacking.
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 reason they are doing the radio station stuff and poaching the top DJs. I'm not sure about that strategy though, we will probably have to wait for the first couple of Apple Watch results to see whether this post Jobs technique of buying coolness is going to work.
I imagine Spotify figure that if they do a surge now and try to match or beat Apple on ancillary services they may very well be able to keep them off Android. Anyway, hopefully the consumer wins out of all this and both companies up their game.