this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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There is a weak defence to be made that they have never raised prices. In the context of our current situation this is just more profiteering.
Salesforce, up 24% https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2022/05/31/q1-fy23-results-update/
Spotify up 14%, 2.8 billion in profits https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-04-25/spotify-reports-first-quarter-2023-earnings/
Apple, 100 billion in Q2 2023
The list goes on and on. All of these companies have laid off staff. Spotify laid off 200.
I've never liked the subscription pricing model and have avoided all of these services. I can't afford hundreds of dollars a year on things that aren't staple items.
Not to shill for Spotify, but the very link you sent shows they made 3 billion in REVENUE, not profit. They actually lost 180 million dollars.
My guess - these price rises are because the VC tap is getting turned off
Hollywood accounting. None of them make a "profit" because they're taxed on profits. Now it's possible that they really are losing 180 million (a lot of startups like uber coast on investors with the assumption they'll turn a profit at some point) but I wouldn't take their word at face value.
Spotify is a publicly traded company. Their financial reports are required to be audited every single year. They really are losing money. There's no way around that.
The studios, most of which are also publicly traded, report billions of dollars in profit every year. Hollywood accounting is about using shell companies to move money around (back to the main studio) while ensuring that nobody ever gets paid out on the profits of the movie by the LLC they set up to produce the movie.
I finally got out of accounting. It's really hard to commit fraud at any scale when you're a publicly traded and audited company. People are gonna call bullshit on that but I'm serious. I would be in favor of requiring every "small business" to be audited on a regular basis because I don't know the exact percentage but I would testify in front of Congress right now that easily over 50% of all the small business clients I ever had were committing fraud somewhere.
One case that comes to mind is a guy with a small construction company who had funneled over a half a million dollars to his personal house, calling it business expenses. I took this to my boss - who signed a code of professional ethics and has a professional license on the line - and their reply was "he's defrauding the government out of about a quarter million dollars but we're not the accounting police and that's why we don't sign his tax returns."
Spotify and Amazon Prime are my only two services. Piracy covers movies and TV.
Spent over 20-years managing my digital music library, always painful. It's a relief to drop all that and just search what I want, receive tunes.
Damned convenient to queue up a playlist when I'm at camp screwing around, singing kaya yoke with my gf, working around the house, all that. Plus, I can download all my songs to a local device about as fast as I can click. I'm often in the boondocks with no internet, but I always have music.
Maybe they shouldn't have paid Joe Rogaine $200 million.
The link you provided says that Spotify actually lost ~$170 million. $3 billion is the revenue.