Online Marketing Trends

CEO and Co-Founder of Spotify Daniel Ek became a multimillionaire at age 23 when he sold an online advertising company in his native Sweden in 2006.

Not many know that it was a rejection  from Google which made ” Daniel what he has achieved today As a 16 year old he was turned away when he applied for a job at Google. This, daniel says was a start of a journey and a turning point  ” when he undertook a resolution’ of not letting age interfere with his knowledge and subsequently gave birth to an idea, which he has since never looked back 

The idea behind Spotify was ” the opportunity” it gave to  the sputtering music industry to create an alternative to music-piracy services such as Napster. Spotify gives a cut of the revenue to record labels and music publishers, which in turn pay out their artists and songwriters at varying rates.

The major labels – Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, Sony Corp.’s Sony Music Entertainment and Access Industries’ Warner Music Group – also own about 15%of the company, collectively. Spotify reported in November that its 2013 revenue was €747 million ($842 million) and it lost €57.8 million ($65 million).

 Spotify revenue model is based on a bait that ” offers a limited, free version of its service”, hoping users will eventually subscribe. The company counts 15 million subscribers to its $9.99 premium plan, and about 45 million active users of its free, ad-supported version – by far the biggest global user base of any subscription music offering

List of  VC  Funding and Equity Investments in Spotify; As of 2015 137 VC funding firms have a stake in the company

Apple begins its newest s quest to shake up the music industry with the launch of its highly-anticipated streaming service Apple Music. The service will complement features similar to those of competing services such as Spotify and Tidal with elements of human curation and a 24/7 global radio station named Beats .According to a survey by Adison Research (before the launch of Tidal). Pandora has a marketshare of 45%.Pandora is the most used music streaming service in the US followed by iheartradio and itunes radio followed by spotify

AOL dialup business is back with a bang   as the chart by Splatf shows above As of September, AOL still had 3.5 million subscribers to its dialup Internet access service generating a third of the company’s revenue and likely most of its profit? That might be more paying U.S. subscribers than Spotify and Hulu Plus have combined. AOL’s earnings release,  shows that “average paid tenure” of its subscribers was about 10.6 years in Q3, up from about 9.4 years last year. (Of course, some of AOL’s existing access subscribers might not even realize they’re still paying for it.AOL finished June with 3.03 million subscribers, down just 84,000 from the prior quarter and 400,000 from a year ago. While the dialup industry is obviously in permanent decline, AOL’s subscriber losses last quarter were less than half what they were a year ago. According to Businessinsider  in the last decade the  monthly AOL bills  on the average has increased from about $18 in 2001 to $19.30 in 2006 to about $17.50 now.What has changed is AOL’s overall size — much smaller now. And the bad news is that most of AOL’s profit still comes from its access business, which is still in permanent decline.

VEVO and Spotify Go Head to Head in the Nordics:

Popular music video site VEVO currently leads the Entertainment-Music category with 5.2 million unique visitors during January 2012 in the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden). However, the music streaming property Spotify isn’t far behind, ranking second with over 4.9 million unique visitors to the site and its desktop application. Over the past year, VEVO has seen an increase of 18 percent by unique visitors while Spotify has seen a slower growth rate of 1 percent. VEVO’s videos were largely consumed via their YouTube channel.