Describe the spotify app & discuss if there are any monetization techniques already in place. Q. Is there any specific user segment to be targeted for monetization ? Or identify opportunities across all ?

Structure-

1. Identify all user segments
2. For all user segments, identify pain points and prioritize them
3. For pain points
   1. are there substitutes / compete solutions, apps ?
   2. is the issue > price of solution ?
   3. is the benefit > price of solution ?
4. For every pain point
   1. is there an existing solution, for the solution workflow ; can there be monetization ?
   2. if there is no existing solution, can we develop a solution that can be monetized?

User segments –

1. Listeners
2. Creators

Creators need an audience and spotify provides a platform for the creators to reach an audience. Pain points of creators –

1. identify an audience
2. publish content
3. analyze content performance
4. act on analysis – improve, monetize, etc

Prioritized pain points: 2, 3, 1, 4

Solutions –

1. publish content:
   1. platform, tools to publish content.
2. analyze content performance:
   1. analysis tools to measure content performance independently, in different cohorts, compete creators
3. identify an audience
   1. ability to filter out profile and define cohorts of consumers
4. act on analysis
   1. manage the content as per performance.
      • content marketing
      • content monetization
      • cohort targeting

Monetization opportunities –

1. platform fee to publish content
   1. competing opportunities :
      1. publishing through private labels – costly, lengthy process, high competition
      2. publishing on youtube, instagram, twitter – wider audience / not specific to music
      3. publishing on other music apps platform – spotify more well known and higher quatity of qualit audience
   2. monetization:
      1. platform publishing fee
2. tools to publish, analyze content performance, user profiles for cohort analysis 3. multi-tier access can be provided to platform 4. tools can be provided with a subscription access
3. act on analysis – content marketing, monetization
   1. fees can be charged to include song as part of curated lists/ marketing strategies
   2. channels can be made subscription access for consumers and commission can contribute to monetization

Solution prioritization –

1. platform fee to publish content
   1. high impact
2. act on analysis – content marketing, monetization
   1. medium impact, low hanging fruit
3. tools to publish, analyze content performance, user profiles for cohort analysis
   1. high impact, high effort to build base platform of tool collection

Spotify is an application which provides users access to music and podcasts from different artists who are well established and those artists who are up and coming. The market of streaming music has various competitors like Apple music, YouTube Music, Saavn (India), Amazon Music, and apps by certain broad band providers such as Wynk. The streaming space has a lot of users who typically listen to various genres of music. However, when we look at the user segments we’ll see that the spectrum starts with students of say 13+ years of age and the spectrum does not end. Let’s now understand how Spotify makes revenue.

1. Ads: Ads can be divided into 2 subcategories. The first type of ads is to promote the premium version of Spotify. However, the second type of ads are for thrid party organizations to host their ads on Spotify. While some ads are skippable, most ads are not.
2. Subscriptions: When we consider the user segment of say 22 to 45. The reason I choose this is because I feel most users in this segment listen to music on a day to day basis. Spotify has subscriptions for diverse user segments. It has different plans for families to use the app or student offers and other day wise or week wise or yearly packages too. Now

Now let’s talk about how else we could monetize the app. First, I’ll talk about some ideas and then go into the specifics of each idea. Here is how I would monetize the app.

1. Considering the goal of our question at hand, we would have to mainly generate revenue. Charging Spotify artists on the times their songs have been listened.
2. Entering new and emerging markets. Especially in areas where the streaming space isn’t well established yet.
3. Showing music videos if available in the premium membership where ads wouldn’t be prevalent.
4. Ads are major revenue generators but providing quality ads would require investment from the company side.

I’ll deep dive into each of these: First we spoke about how new artists can be charged a nominal fee. How this would work is, we would charge the artist only if the artist’s song has been listened to a threshold value. Once the song/podcast crosses a given value, we can charge a nominal value for each time the song/podcast has been listened to. Second, I mentioned entering into new markets. While people prefer watching music on YouTube. It has its drawbacks. Entering an emerging markets by providing really viable and reasonable premium subscription on the basis of usage rather than charging a monthly/daily/yearly fee would be better and attract more users as well. Third, I mentioned the inclusion of music videos for certain music titles on Spotify. This would be a premium feature and would be available to those users who would be willing to pay the yearly fee too. The reason I say this is because users would prefer to listen while watching the music videos too. And users who do this, do this more often than just listening to a song. Finally, we could provide quality ads. Depending on the genre of the song being listened to, we could cater our ads to provide personalized ads to each user. This would generate huge ad revenue too!

Among all the above stated methods to generate revenue, I would prioritize on the first and second suggestion I stated earlier.

Spotify is a music streaming app. Monetization of Spotify happens in multiple ways :

1. Ads
2. Subscriptions (Ads free, premium)
3. Make Spotify default on Android phones as Apple Music on Iphones
4. Spotify to be a default on Nest hubs
5. Exclusive membership (New songs )
6. Learn with Spotify classes
7. Chat with Content creators (for a minimum fee)