this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
464 points (98.3% liked)

Technology

59197 readers
3468 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] LetMeEatCake@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Interesting. That's dated October of 2009 and says Spotify had 5m users. Looks like they have ~200m users today. At a linear scaling it'd be twenty times larger, or £120m=$154m per month. That's $1.85b/year.

In reality it wouldn't scale linearly, but it also accounts for zero salaries, which was the major component of my comment.

[–] linearchaos@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Look I appreciate the downvotes and all, but didn't you just say that fixed costs don't go up and down with users?

[–] LetMeEatCake@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

(1) I didn't downvote you.
(2) I said something similar but critically different:

Building a streaming platform that expects to have multiple billions of dollars in revenue across hundreds of millions of users is going to have enormous fixed costs that cannot be trivially scaled down if user counts are lower. If they plan around a much lower user count they can scale it down at that planning phase, but not after the fact (at least not easily).

The intended size of the platform dictates the fixed costs.

And...
(3) The data you provided wasn't fixed costs. It was variable costs like server time, music rights, and bandwidth.