Tag: Audited Subscribers

How Accurate are Music Subscription Service Subscriber Numbers?

All of you who subscribe to the New York Times, fly Quantas, use any of a number of mobile carriers or who are in the 6th month of your third Spotify 30 day (or 90) free trial may be interested in this post.

According to Billboard in a story titled “Spotify Officially Hits 50 Million Paid Subscribers“, the “official” announcement came from a tweet:

I found this intriguing–how did we go from “Spotify Officially Hits 50 Million Paid Subscribers” in the headline to a tweet that doesn’t really say the same thing?  Maybe like this?

screenshot_20170224-140304

First, what makes a tweet “official”?  Much less “official” totals of “paid subscribers”?  Finding out may be like asking what makes ketchup “fancy”.

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Newspaper subscriptions have long been verified by a company specializing in verifying circulation.  Television has the Nielsen ratings, music has Soundscan, and so on.  None of these systems are perfect, but they make it harder to outright misrepresent success in a business where frequently the only people who really know how well they are doing are the people who would like you to believe they are doing well.  This is nothing new, it’s as old as moral hazard.

The quest for truth leads one to independent verification services.

spotify-clown-car
A clown car for 6 million streams

Reuters reported the same story with a more subdued headline: “Spotify Says It Reached 50 Million Subscribers“.  A little more factual, a little less Kool Aid.

This is important because I have yet to find anyplace that Spotify actually says the 50 million subscribers were “paid”.  The press leaped to that conclusion, but Spotify did not say that.

And neither does Apple, a company which is already public and has to be careful what they say about the money they are making or not making.  Yet somehow nobody transforms Eddie Cue’s statement that Apple has “well past 20 million subscribers” into an “official” statement implying a verified number of “paid” subs.

Actually–it may well be that there is a significant revenue difference between “paid subscribers” and “subscribers”.  As the Music Industry Blog wrote last year:

[T]here is a more important story here: Spotify’s accelerated growth in Q2 2016 was driven by widespread use of its $0.99 for 3 months promotional offer. Which itself comes on the back of similar offers having supercharged Spotify’s subscriber growth for the last 18 months or so. In short, 9.99 needs to stop being 9.99 in order to appeal to consumers.

As Spotify has been “dominant” in the music subscription business for a while now (and yes, I mean that in an antitrust sense of “dominant”), it seems that it’s high time for someone to independently audit the veracity of the number of their subscribers.

Or would the Securities and Exchange Commission like to rely on a tweet?

 

 

Investors Deserve a Standard for Measuring Music Service Subscribers

“Today, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek officially announced that the streaming service has hit the 30 million paying subscribers.”

Digital Music News.

Spotify “officially” announced today that it has 30 million paying subscribers.  What does “officially” mean?

I wonder if that’s like its announcement that it pays 70% of its revenue to rights holders–except when it doesn’t as David Lowery’s class action and other challenges to Spotify’s arithmetic credibility have revealed.

How do we know that Spotify has 30 million subscribers?  Because Spotify’s CEO says so.  Moral hazard much?  Isn’t that the same guy who claims to be the savior of the music industry but is underpaying songwriters to the tune of millions of dollars?

The ability of advertising supported media to deliver a reliable audience is hardly news, so it is hardly news that someone figured out that these numbers need to have some independent third party auditing those statements.

The Alliance for Audited Media is just such an independent third party.  AAM describes itself:

The Alliance for Audited Media connects North America’s top advertisers, ad agencies, media companies and platform providers. Our clients stand for trusted media analysis across all brand platforms—print, web, mobile, email and more—to make smart decisions. AAM delivers insightful, audited cross-media metrics that matter. We are one of the world’s most experienced providers of technology certification audits to industry standards established by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, Media Rating Council and Mobile Marketing Association. As a third-party auditor, we deliver media assurance via our verification and information services and provide solutions that empower media professionals to transact with greater trust and confidence.

It would be helpful for investors to know exactly what a “subscriber” means to Spotify (and other DSPs for that matter).  If the user is “subscribing” to an ad supported service, such as Spotify’s dearly beloved “freemium” service with Ads by Google, what does that mean?  Does it mean that a user has paid their bill for 90 consecutive days, or does it mean that the user is on their fourth 90 day free trial?

Given complaints by experts like WPP’s CEO Sir Martin Sorrell that click fraud and false billing is rampant on YouTube, shouldn’t investors expect to have subscribers audited by an impartial source?  (Harvard Business School Professor Ben Edelman called it back in 2009 with his prescient “Toward a Bill of Rights for Online Advertisers“.)

In this particular context, “investor” takes on a broader meaning.  Spotify and its defenders routinely ask that artists and songwriters “trust” but “don’t verify” to help Spotify grow–that is, to “invest” in Spotify’s future by taking a low royalty today for a burger on Thursday.  Now that class action lawsuits from songwriters are motivating the company to cover its tracks, it’s starting to look like Spotify is asking for a burger today for a dollar on Thursday.

It’s time that all investors in music services got independent verification of exactly what these subscriber numbers actually mean.