Friday, July 27, 2018

Latin American markets helped Spotify add eight million new subscribers in last quarter | UNLIMITED | CMU

Spotify

Spotify’s quarterly reports as a publicly listed company are still novel enough to cause a ripple of chatter among the music community. Meanwhile on Wall Street, yesterday’s update on the market-leading streaming service’s subscriber numbers and revenues initially caused the firm’s share price to wobble a bit. But it then later peaked at $198.99 a share, its highest share price since the company listed in April.

The headline figure of the latest quarterly report was that Spotify now has 83 million paying subscribers, up from 75 million in the previous quarter. Which means the streaming firm continues to boast impressive growth figures, even if it is still a loss-making enterprise for now. Operating losses this quarter were 90 million euros.

With lots of reporting of late about how Apple Music is starting to outperform its main rival in the US market, Spotify made much of its successes beyond the United States yesterday, and especially in emerging markets. Growth rates are particularly impressive in Latin America, it added.

That led to questions about Spotify’s plans to further extend the number of countries it operates in and the licensing challenges that must be tackled with each new country it enters. There has been particular talk recently about how licensing challenges are delaying a launch for Spotify in India.

Responding to that chatter, Spotify boss Daniel Ek conceded that licensing deals are “always a complicated manoeuvre”, according to the Financial Times. As a result, he said, he couldn’t “accurately estimate” when Spotify would launch in India. Nevertheless, Ek added that he was confident Spotify would retain its market-leadership status in paid-for streaming, despite the challenge posed by Apple in America.

CMU, of course, is an important Spotify shareholder. What, with our single share and all. Had we sold that yesterday we’d have been $43.82 up on the deal. Exciting times. We’re holding out for the big $50 pay day, though. Don’t screw it up Spotify!

[from https://ift.tt/2lvivLP]

No comments: