Spotify: Case Analysis: Streaming on Music Industry & Online Music Services Competition

Student Last Name 1
Student Name
Professor Name
Class
Date
Spotify: Case Analysis
1. Streaming on Music Industry & Online Music Services Competition
In “Spotify” (Elberse and de Pfyffer), a clear business case is made on emerging status of innovative streaming services vis-à-vis increasingly declining in status (and market share) of conventional music labels. Specifically, Spotify – one major online streaming service among a plethora of similar emerging services including Beats Music, Deezer, Google Play Music, Rdio, and Rhapsody – has emerged in response to an increasingly challenging problem in music industry: exponential growth of piracy and file sharing practices and platforms. Splitting music offerings into different tiers – free, premium and premium plus – Spotify has made possible for users, artists, labels, publishers and, not least, copyright holders, to maintain a reasonable share of great listening experiences (for users and fans) and equally reasonable, if not often questionable, streams of revenues for all relevant stakeholders. Competitively, online music streaming services could be characterized as fragmented. Given rapidly changing status of artists
– and, for that matter, labels – shares, likes, views and moods are perhaps defining factors of who reaps most benefits, financially and status-wise, as opposed to more conventional and outdated model whereby artists (and labels) could enjoy financial and status benefits for years.
2. Spotify Business Model: Artists, Labels, Consumers & Advertisers
In essence, Spotify's business model is, in hindsight, a fairly common model. In early
Student Last Name 2
2000s, co-opting, i.e. sharing content among users based on advertising and subscription
revenue streams, was a novelty and was met, as ...