[saym]

They've gone from 28 million to 71 million premium subscribers in 3 years with a declining, single digit, churn rate. I'm impressed.

I'm a happy Spotify customer, I hope they continue their growth and become a pillar of the music industry.

[pyronite]

I was a Spotify lifer until I butted up against their 10,000 song limit. [1]

Now, I'm using Google Play Music. There's no doubt in my mind that everything else outside of this limit is better on Spotify.

Please, Spotify, fix this! Let me help inflate your valuation!

1. https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/Library-Song-Limit...

[tomhschmidt]

+1. Ability to upload music on Google Play Music is also keeping me from switching to Spotify. I have a lot of tracks that simply aren't in the Spotify catalog. If they add that, I'd switch tomorrow.

[peapicker]

I believe playlists don't count as library (please correct me if I'm wrong) - so you can effectively surpass the 10,000 as a limit by adding songs to playlists instead of the library.

I've actually changed my model primarily around playlists and don't actually use the library feature of spotify hardly at all.

[INTPenis]

I like google play, also converted from spotify. But I don't like that albums disappear from google play.

This happened at spotify too and I assume it's due to legal issues. When an artist released a certain album on one label and only that album disappears.

It's very annoying and is pushing me back to good old piracy.

[dx034]

Does anyone know the technical background of this? They talk about providing a great experience for others, so I guess it's about performance. But library entries can be partitioned by users so there should be no performance effect of 100k songs per library of one user on others? Also, the current 10k limit doesn't represent much data if stored with a bit of meta data.

[arctangent]

This happened to me too, so I'm in the process of switching back to Apple Music.

I scrobble to last.fm so I can still get decent recommendations over there.

[amorphid]

I left Pandora for a similar reason. They had (still have?) a 100 station limit. It was lame. I am also a Google Play Music user.

[chrisseaton]

I don't understand - I thought you could stream any audio from their collection that you wanted on Spotify? Do you have to add audio to your library first? Otherwise why does it matter what is in your library and what isn't if you can stream anything?

[KozmoNau7]

Instead of saving full albums (which adds every single track to your saved tracks list), focus on saving your very favorite tracks, and add the full album as a playlist instead.

[nuclear_eclipse]

Ironically, I tried and failed to switch to Google Play Music because they limit playlists to 1000 songs, and I have a couple different playlists with 1600+ songs each.

[LudoA]

10K songs is limiting to you?! Wow, how/for what do you use Spotify?

At a (low!) estimate of 4 minutes per song, if you listen to Spotify for 3hrs/day, it would still take you 222 days to listen to all of them once.

Is this a form of data hoarding? If not, how do you use that many songs?

[protonimitate]

Same. I'm a Spotify lifer unless something catastrophic happens to their service or media availability.

The only alternative service I even debated about was Apple Music when they first announced their streaming service, but there is no clear advantage to their service and I hate the Apple Music UI.

I hope they find a way to help a bigger % of the revenue get into the hands of artists and start cutting out the big record companies who just middleman everything. But other than that, no complaints.

[kaftoy]

I really don't want to change this discussion into a "which is the best music streaming service" debate, but I am really curious, why haven't your considered Google Play Music? Interface? Songs count? Price?

I am subbed to GPM for a few years now. I did it first because Spotify was and still isn't available in my country, but I don't think I would switch if they become available tomorrow.

[on_and_off]

disclaimer : I worked for a music streaming service for several years

I don't really like the Play Music UI (but I don't hate it either, the new parts are very nice, but the album pages could use a bit more love).

I dislike the spotify UI though (why is it THAT dark and depressive ?) and play music removes the ads from youtube (us user) and pays youtubers, so that's an easy choice.

Oh, the winning feature of Play Music for me is that I can add my own album, even if it does not belong to their catalog. It still shows with all it's metadata and cover as an album.

[ishansharma]

I was an Apple music since launch(till a month back). But once I tried Spotify and the playlists, I switched instantly. While Apple Music is a competitor, it's not everywhere like Spotify is and their recommendations are horrible. In all time using them, I discovered 2 songs that I liked. With 4 weeks on Spotify, I'm already at 25!

[jakereps]

I'm with you on that. I've been a Spotify Premium member since day 1 of US availability, with no intention of switching to others. The only alternative I've even tried is TIDAL, through their trial, to see if the lossless quality was worth the $10 extra a month, but didn't renew beyond that.

This may be one of my first "buy and hold" stocks simply for the personal reason of loving the service.

[actuator]

*18 million to 71 million in 3 years.

If you contrast this with 51 -> 92 for ad supported MAUs in 3 years it seems like they have been successful in converting a lot of ad supported users to premium ones.

[52-6F-62]

In Canada, one of the largest telecom companies gives new accounts to their services/Spotify free 6 months of Spotify. That may have helped boost the numbers recently.

https://www.rogers.com/customer/support/article/share-everyt...

[adventured]

Those offers seem to be all over the place. They're common in the US as well.

The challenge for Spotify will be the next few years, seeing how they withstand the substantial onslaught coming from Apple's music subscription service (which is booming as well). I'm skeptical Spotify can stay in the fight financially over time. There's nothing they can do in music that will ever produce the kind of profit required to support a $25 billion market cap (critical given they're about to open themselves up to public shareholder scrutiny). If they can't, the public shareholders will eventually force a sale of the company.

They'd need 250-300 million paying subscribers, most likely, to get to ~$800m in net income (~5% net income margins), assuming they can ever actually make money to begin with. That'd be a generous ~31 PE. It's essentially impossible.

Apple, Google and Amazon on the other hand, never need to earn a penny of profit in music. It'll be perpetually in their interests to hold music service margins on the floor. The music industry won't be so stupid as to harm Spotify, given they'll want the leverage vs Apple & Co? Well they successfully killed off Pandora on margin squeezing, so sure they will. Their view is there's always another company to replace the last one, and that their music rights are the value that's core and eternal.