ALLi News Editor, Dan Holloway
For the past two weeks we have seen stories proliferate that tell the story of the tech giant Spotify misstepping as it enters the smaller world of publishing.
This week, we have been reminded of the truly colossal scale of the tech industry with a story that pitched Spotify as the minnow taking on a tech giant. The giant in this question is Apple, whose $3trillion value is so eye-wateringly huge as to be incomprehensible to most of us.
The story surrounds, as so many of them seem to these days, a lawsuit. In a move that will strike many in Spotify’s “downstream” as somewhat ironic, the company has claimed that Apple is using anticompetitive behaviour in making competitors pay for more than a basic presence in the app store.
Apple may well lose the case. But it has responded vigorously and publicly by reeling off some statistics about Spotify’s app store presence and usage that show just how big the streaming service has become. To mention just one, the Spotify app has been downloaded, re-downloaded, or updated 119 billion times across Apple devices. That’s 15 times for every human being alive. Apple also points out that Spotify accounts for 56% of the global music streaming industry.
BookBeat
Talking of the growth of the audio business, it has been a successful time for another Scandinavian audiobook company, Bookbeat. Bookbeat is the audiobook platform owned by Swedish giant Bonnier. Last year the company made $118m in revenue from its streaming service, 70% of which came from its international markets. This represents a whopping 28% increase year on year. Another interesting stat is that the greatest growth came in the 25-34 year old population segment.
