Translated material
IPhone, chanson and Spotify
What the Russians will listen to when the "Swedes" will take care of their tastes
On July 8, the exclusive leak of the informed publication Music Business Worldwide reported a good news: Spotify, the world's largest streaming music service, is going to Russia. Though with the third attempt in six years, he goes. Moreover - earlier than planned for the fall. Rumors confirmed through his channels the cult Variety: rides, and even in the same team with MTS!
Although MTS and Spotify jointly refused to confirm the information, I think you can already start rejoicing: our hipsters will no longer have to resort to unworthy tricks like a VPN ... No, not blocking Roskomnadzor, but Spotify, which until recently did not want to see Russians among 248 million happy users.
As you know, the event is significant. Especially for those who have no idea what Spotify is, with what they eat, who needs it, and is it necessary at all. We’ll talk about this.
If we assume that Spotify is only what the company officially positions itself-the Internet service for legal and free listening to more than 50 million musical compositions, domestic music lovers should not experience any particular joy. Because we have such good and our own enough: from torrent trackers and VKontakte to Yandex.Music.
If in the case of the first two Spotify, as an argument of the competition, it may try to put pressure on conscience (“you steal from your beloved musician, and he is starving!”), And in the case of Yandex.Music, there are no chances to knock out a place in Russia from a “Swedish company” (I will explain the quotes a little later). “Yandex.Musik” regularly does not allow musicians to die of hunger and at the same time in terms of streaming services is not inferior to Spotify. The Russian analogue provides:
free subscription plans;
Audio striming in real time;
obtaining personal recommendations;
a variety of playlists (personalized, thematic, popular and copyrights - from the service itself, from brands, from the media, from musicians, from bloggers, from music labels, etc.);
constantly updated charts of popularity;
Integration with Last.FM and Deezer services;
Search for music by texts;
40 million tracks (both figures - that 50 million at Spotify, that 40 million in Yandex are deprived of practical meaning: to familiarize themselves with the full list of musical masterpieces, the user will leave either 190 or 150 years of continuous round -the -clock listening).
In addition to the fact that today is included in the gentleman's set of streaming service, Yandex.Musiks can contrast Spotify also advantages arising from the status of a local resident: a preferential subscription to Yandex.Plus side services (from Kinopoisk + Amediathek to the online cinema), buying live concerts, etc.
In other words, Spotify in the competition against Yandex.Musica would have no more chance of victory than in the fight against Chinese QQ Music and Netease Music in China, if not one “but”: but ”
In reality, Spotify is not just a musical striming service, but something completely different, with a completely different nature and other tasks.
And thanks to this “different”, Spotify chances to achieve serious success in the Russian market are very, very high.
The distant idea of what Spotify is in reality according to financial documents that the company is forced to publicize, being a public business (its shares are traded on the New York Stock Exchange). Here, for example, is a curious passage from the report for 2019: “If we do not be able to carefully predict, recommend and lose content that will enjoy our subscribers, we will not be able to hold the existing ones and will not be able to attract new ones necessary to ensure the growth and continue the successful financial business.”
Where does such emergency difficulties in the life of Spotify? From there, that the main competitors of the company are Apple, Amazon and Google, who, unlike Spotify, develop and sell their gadgets with their built -in streaming services! In order to somehow resist, all the more-to win in the competition, Spotify has to do not engage in music, but, in the literal sense of the word, preparing human souls.
It is this Spotify that is: a giant factory for the study and processing of human tastes, preferences and needs. And in this, the Swedes have neither competitors nor equal.
I stubbornly eloqufully the “Swedishness” of Spotify at all by chance. There is absolutely nothing in this company in this company, except for the names of the founders - Daniel Eka and Martin Lorentson, who in 2006 muddied this whole story in Stockholm.
Six months after the opening of the first office, the business was transferred to London and since then, in spirit, in the tactics of expansion, in terms of NURAPA and by aggression, Spotify behaves like a typically Anglo-Saxon company, without the slightest hint of the notorious “Scandinavian business model” with its social pathos and socialist ideals.
Today, the headquarters of Spotify is located in the World Commercial Center of New York, and regional offices are open in 18 capitals of the world. The office is also preserved in Stockholm - for tax reasons. At the same time, Spotify, at the insistence of marketers, promotes itself as a “Swedish company”, because it is believed that in the eyes of youth this gives her a unique flavor of Europeanism, democracy and the hipster spirit.
The fact that Spotify is an unusual company, it becomes completely clear after the analysis of the numbers of the same financial statements. In 2015, losses before tax payment amounted to $ 225 million. In 2016 - losses of 533 million in 2017 - losses of 1 billion 233 million (!). In 2018 - losses of 173 million in 2019 - losses 131 million.
You will laugh, but until 2015, Spotify also had no profitable years: losses on losses. At the same time, the money is poured and poured into the company, poured and poured. Spotify investors are, among others, Coca-Cola, Teliasonera (telecommunications giant Sweden and Finland), Chinese monster monopolist Tencent, financial octopus Goldman Sachs, countless private pension funds, stars of show business and just good people (Ashton Kucher, Jared, Jared Summer, Yuri Milner, Alisher Usmanov).
Of course, no one gives money to anyone for beautiful eyes. Big money bore only where investors are in animal instincts to feel profit (without this flair, they themselves would not initially be large money).
Why then do people invest money in a company that does not show profit? The question is rhetorical: look at the competitors of Spotify.
For more than 10 years in a row, Amazon demonstrated continuous losses from year to year, while the shares of the Bezos store only grew.
Apple made a huge profit, but never shared money with his shareholders until the death of Steve Jobs. The company began to pay its first dividends only under Tim Kuk, and even then only because they were literally squeezed out of the more supple leader Raider-fool Karl Ican.
An example of Amazon (as well as Netflix) suggests that the most perspicacious investors do not give money to momentary profit, but for a unique product or business model.
Amazon’s skate was the installation of the creation of an infrastructure suitable for the total conquest of the retail market. It took 25 years to complete the impossible task, but it still happened: in 2019, the online store went around Walmart, which has 11 thousand 484 supermarkets around the world, after which Amazon became the largest retailer of the planet.
Netflix horse, which allowed the company to demonstrate losses from year to year and at the same time increase the capitalization of their securities is a unique model of online rental, which was born in the Blockbuster total domination with its physical lease DVD.
We have already remembered the Spotify horse - these are unique technologies for the analysis of gigantic volumes of metadata, which allow not only to guess the tastes and preferences of music lovers, but also successfully form them.
No one can do this better than Spotify. The audience knows this and the crowd of Banderalogs looks into the mouth of the boat of the KAA in anticipation of a new portion of “right” sound pleasure.
Spotify total dominance - notorious playlists.
The fact is that 90% of the inhabitants of the planet listen to music exclusively passively. They have neither desire, no need, nor ability to independently deepen their musical knowledge, to form and improve their own tastes.
Those units that have these needs and abilities are never using streaming services. In Western countries, such music lovers go to the store (including online), they study new market offers themselves, choose and then buy their favorite music.
In domestic penalties, the behavioral pattern of advanced music lovers does not differ from the Western exceptions: they do not buy music, but are accepted as a gift to torrent trackers, where everything that is collected by a refined musical soul is collected.
The remaining 90% of consumers of the musical product rely in their choice that others authoritatively offer them.
The most undemanding listen to the radio, where something that is in an unobtrusive background is used that are massive abstract popularity.
A more advanced audience uses streaming services, relying on playlists, which make up their favorite musicians, movie star, role -playing heroes, fashionable people, less often musical critics.
Spotify playlists look like offhand, however, the technology of their production has no analogues. At first, the service does not offer anything, especially, does not impose anything, but only analyzes what the user orders himself. But after a couple of tracks, the artificial intelligence algorithms selected by the SPOTIM from Echo Nest, absorbed in 2014) are included in a couple of tracks themselves and begin to meticulously select music for this user, which, according to many criteria, is simply obliged to like him.
When selection, absolutely everything is taken into account: from the duration of listening to the tracks, to age, sex, knowledge of languages, intelligence (determined, again according to preferences: you must agree, fans of pop and classical music are residents of different planets), nationality, citizenship, citizenship and dozen other parameters that are sucking from metadata supplied by the listener himself.
In parallel with an algorithmic analysis in Spotify, the army of regional music editors (the so -called curators) is working,
which make up their own playlists. They have already set another task: not to adapt to the listeners, but to actively influence them, to form tastes and preferences, but indirectly - to properly establish fashionable musical trends and thereby distribute the cash flows “correct” (for Spotify).
The latter circumstance is very important, given the most difficult relationships that the company has developed with the company with grames, large labels like Sony, Warner and Universal and the musicians themselves in 14 years.
Spotify relationships with manufacturers and content owners are too complicated to reflect them in a brief newspaper replica dedicated to the spotify purely to the Russian market (at the time of writing this article is also hypothetical). I can only say that the “Swedes”, following the results of perennial friction, developed a deep understanding. The depths of this Agren can be judged at least by the fact that Spotify, after two unsuccessful attempts, managed to overcome Warner Music resistance and enter the Russian market.
The fact is that the New York recording giant leads the crusade of the musical industry against the “Russian pirates”, which, according to Warner, are the main distributors of the counterfeit on the planet. After it became clear that it was not possible to remove the pirates not only on the private torrent trackers, but even in the VKontakte social network de facto controlled by the state, Warner Music made it clear to Spotify that it would only enter Russia through its corpse (that is, without a unified Warner license, which owns a copy of almost half that should and half that was soaked in and half Nantantzed humanity).
I don’t know what words of the beliefs were found by Spotify leaders for irreconcilable pirators from Warner Music, but the result is obvious: Spotify enters the Russian market, and with it all the music of American merchants talents. It remains only to guess what kind of competition the “Yandex” will be undertaken in order to cope with the main brainwater and form of musical tastes of the planet.
The final smear that clearly demonstrates the scale of Spotify's ambitions in terms of active influence on the audience: one of the company's divisions - Spotify Creator Technology Research Lab - is engaged in the writing of musical compositions inspired not by human genius, but by artificial intelligence.
In 2017, the Vulture publication published a study entitled “The problem with streaming: as spamers, superstars and technological giants, the musical industry”, which accused Spotify of generating computer musical tracks.
This pseudo -music was then attributed to non -existent fake musicians, spinning in premium playlists and began to bring serious profit without any need to pay with the copyright holders for the used content.
Spotify pretended not to understand what was at stake, and refuted evil insinuations about “fake musicians”: “We pay all the commission in all tracks that only fall into our playlists.”
Clear business that is paid. True, not living people, but homunculus bred in test tubes of their own laboratories.
And yes, Spotify is right: it is worthless to call an artificial intelligence fake! This does not correspond to the ambitions of the era and offends technology. In any case, it is necessary to be prepared that such masters-installations of mass culture come to the Russian market that they are breathtaking from the same thought, what tracks will listen and humming local youth in some six months.
From the editorial office
After the publication of the material, the VKontakte press service contacted us. Below is an excerpt from their letter."VKontakte" has been successfully cooperating with the copyright holders of musical content for many years. The company signed agreements with the world's largest copyright holders, including Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music, The Orchard, Merlin Network, Believe Digital. And in accordance with these agreements, VKontakte pays deductions to copyright holders. ”
Latest update: 07/14/120 | 13:44 Moscow time