Spotify's Complements?

 

Anne Steele at the WSJ reports that Spotify is the leading audio-streaming platform with 600 million users and a 30% market share. Even so, it seems to be struggling. After a couple of rounds of layoffs, some false starts from expansion into podcasting, concert promotion, and audio books, it earned its first quarterly profits since 2022 in the last quarter of 2023. Competition with tech giants Apple, Amazon, and Google have kept margins low - for every dollar it earns on music streaming, it pays $0.70 in royalties.

But its tech giant competitors do not have to earn profits on streaming music. Their other services can be complementary to audio-streaming. For example, Apple would be happy if Apple Music operated at a loss so long as it helped to sell more high-margin iPhones. This is exactly what Netscape complained about in the late 1990s when Microsoft gave the Internet Explorer away for free. Netscape's revenue model was based on the sales of the browser. Microsoft's was based on sales of operating systems. So long as a free browser sold more computers with Windows already preinstalled, Microsoft was happy. How could Netscape compete with free? How can Spotify compete with subsidized competitors?

Steele hints at this problem by suggesting that Spotify could be a takeover target for companies like Microsoft, Netflix, or Tencent. These companies all have services that could be complements for music streaming. They might be willing to subsidize Spotify if doing so sells more operating systems, movies, or video games.