Spotify has been a pretty popular streaming music service for quite some time. Even with competitors like Beats Music, Tidal, Google Play Music, Rdio and others out there, Spotify has stood out from the rest. Spotify recently announced an event for May 20th, where they are expected to announce a few new plans and possibly features. Ahead of Apple’s relaunch of Beats Music, which is slated for WWDC which takes place from June 8th to the 12th at Moscone West.
The company is looking to enter the web video business, and that could happen as soon as this month. According to a report out of The Wall Street Journal. People familiar with this also stated that the service could be available to subscribers and non-subscribers, as well as include ads. Spotify had 60 million active users as of January of this year. Of which, about 15 million are paying the $9.99 per month for the premium tier. Despite that, Spotify has yet to turn a profit. The move into web video business is likely due to the intense competition coming into the streaming music space. Thanks to the likes of Tidal and Beats Music, mostly.
As the WSJ reports, jumping into the pool of web video isn’t going to be easy. As internet giants, Google and Facebook own that sector of the industry pretty heavily. YouTube is by far the number one web video platform, and that’s unlikely to change any time soon. Although Facebook is gaining ground, likely due to how large their reach is, even though Google’s probably even bigger. Since Spotify has been around, they’ve posted a loss each and every quarter. So there’s something that needs to be done to turn a profit and hopefully that happens rather soon for the company. Competition is always good, but also, Spotify will need to find a way to differentiate their service from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and others, for users to really latch on and use their service. Like they have with their streaming music service. So far, this sounds a lot like the YouTube Music Key and Google Play Music Unlimited that Google announced a few months ago.