What is the decision facing Spotify?

Whether it’s firing us up for a workout or helping mend a broken heart, music can play a meaningful role in our lives.
Streaming music market leader Spotify understands this and is using data analytics to connect us to the music they think we’ll love and also to connect the artists who create that music to their fans.
Founded in Sweden in 2006, Spotify began as an alternative to other music download services—both legal and illegal.
The company shook up the music industry by offering customers music from Spotify’s vast library paid for in one of two ways: your time or your money. Subscribers can listen for free but be interrupted by ads, or they can pay a subscription fee for ad-free listening. The fee-based service adds other nice features, like the ability to choose tracks, unlimited track skipping, listening offline, and higher-quality audio.
Music lovers have embraced Spotify’s model, catapulting the firm to a dominant position in music streaming (2018 stats showed a 36 percent market share compared to 17 percent for Apple Music and 10 percent for Amazon). But in contrast, music creators—the artists—generally have not been so enthusiastic.
This is largely because Spotify makes deals with record labels, and by the time the money trickles down to artists, the amounts can be pretty small. This famously caused Taylor Swift to pull her music catalog from Spotify in 2014 (although she later acquiesced).
Spotify’s active user count tops 140 million, with more than 60 million of those on their paid Premium service. And with all that downloading, track choosing, and skipping, the company collects a lot of data, which they use to better understand and support customer preferences. A popular service is their Discovery Weekly feature, which provides a personalized playlist each week. It’s intended to be songs you haven’t heard before, composed of tunes that Spotify’s algorithms (enabled by AI) believe you’ll like. Think of it as sort of a personalized mix tape (if you’re too young to know what a mix tape is, then you’ll have to Google it). You can also create and name your own playlists—like one for romantic evenings at home and another for that weekend barbecue bash in the backyard. Overall, one of the best value-adding elements of Spotify is the sheer scope of the music available—all genres, virtually any artists, and millions of songs, right on your desktop, tablet, or mobile device.