Spotify Technology SA (SPOT)

The leading music streaming platform

This is the second of three reports on companies that are platforms or marketplaces. A platform is a location where buyers and sellers meet to buy or sell a particular service. The platform company provides the venue and takes some revenues from the user(s). Stock exchanges are an example of a platform. Others include eBay, Airbnb, Spotify and Uber. Our first note was on Uber. In this note, we look at Spotify.

Spotify Technology SA is a Luxembourg-based company that offers digital music-streaming, podcast and audiobook services. The 2023 Annual Report stated the following:

“Our mission is to unlock the potential of human creativity by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it. We are the world's most popular audio streaming subscription service. With a presence in 184 countries and territories, our platform includes 602 million MAUs and 236 million Premium Subscribers as of December 31, 2023.”

Spotify’s Background

Spotify was founded by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentson in 2006 and launched in Sweden in 2008. At the time, the music industry had been decimated by online piracy. File sharing programmes like Napster had made piracy easy and downloading music costless.

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