Spotify

Spotify is the audio-streaming company that appears across the wiki as a public-equity case study, a platform in the music and podcast industries, and an example in marketplace and aggregation arguments.

• Equity research. Saved investor threads include an 80-page “$SPOT deep dive” from Patient Capital with bear, base and bull cases (1- Thread - $SPOT Deep Dive… (tweet)), a long-term bullish thesis drawn from Coho Capital’s 2020 Q2 letter that also draws general lessons about customer-centric, globally scalable businesses (Pretty bullish long-term thesis on… (tweet), Customer-Centric Business), and a reader exchange on a Mostly Borrowed Ideas deep dive (Always Enjoy and Deeply Appreciate… (tweet)).
• Strategy. Brett Bivens frames it as an “Ambient Media” company and contrasts its acquisition of The Ringer with its Gimlet purchase (Just published a (very) deep… (tweet), Ambient Media).
• Podcasting. Ben Thompson reports that Spotify’s chief content officer, Dawn Ostroff, is pressing in-house studios for new hits because each new show has a smaller audience than its predecessors (Where Are Hit Podcasts?, Spotify and Podcast Aggregation, Protesting Rogan; see also Aggregation Theory, Podcasting).
• Marketplace structure. It serves as the worked example for the fragmentation question in Six Hurdles To Tipping a Market: its artists and audiences are fragmented, but it sits at the mercy of a few labels.
• Artist economics. One long-read cites streaming payouts of under $300 for about 73,000 plays and $0.21 for almost 8,000 (Deconstructing — How Can Indie Musicians Break Even); You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song is by Glenn McDonald, who built Spotify’s listening maps.
• Operators. Barry McCarthy is described as having led the direct IPO at Spotify (☁️ Who is Barry McCarthy… (tweet)).

Where this appears

• 1- Thread - $SPOT Deep Dive… (tweet)
• Always Enjoy and Deeply Appreciate… (tweet)