I love Spotify! I don’t love “Jonathan from Spotiy”, who voices Spotify adverts with extraordinarily poor grammar, but I do love Spotify. And I’m going to share some of my thoughts on the service right now.
It turns out that I’m not the only one who loves Spotify – as of March last year the service had over 1 million users. And at their 1 year anniversary, October 2009, Spotify, while far from perfect, was going strong. See the blog post on their official blog: http://www.spotify.com/blog/archives/2009/10/08/overnight-success-takes-a-long-time%E2%80%A6.
So is Spotify just a great idea, or also a great business? Difficult to say really. It is true that the service is rapidly expanding; and in a market with little competition. The business is still losing money however, and with such good free service, is there really any point getting a premium account?
At present, probably not. The basic problem is that the free service is just too good. I have a free account, and I’m more than satisfied, and I’m a very fussy person.
So I suppose this starts a debate, is “free” always a good idea. Attention grabbing it may be, but it could quite easily overshadow paid services.
Now I love free stuff just as much as the next person. And my companies often explore offering free services / products to clients. But at the end of the day, for any company to be viable, it must make money; and that creates a massive dilemma.
The age old case of massive publicity, exposure and clients / users, but no cash initially and potentially for quite a while. Or fewer clients and publicity, but a better cash flow. Realistically, I think we all have to find a happy balance.
