Spotify has already gotten off to an interesting start this year. Its stock rebounded in a big way, and now a news report tells us it wants to conquer Apple. How? By discovering new artists around the world, a la Danny Ocean.
Spotify All Over the World
If you’re not familiar with Danny Ocean, he’s the artist from Venezuela who uploaded his song Me Rehuso on YouTube and Spotify. As the Financial Times reports, it got onto the Spotify charts in Colombia, Chile
Right now apparently Latin America is “having a moment,” and Spotify is hoping to make similar waves in other parts of the world as well. In hopes of beating Apple, Spotify is hoping to get hundreds of millions more to sign up from what the company calls the “Rest of the World.”
How Spotify Hopes to Take Over the Rest of the World
Spotify easily became the top streaming service in Latin America, and Chile is a fast growing market as well. Now that these markets are blowing up, the company is convinced they can spread out all over the world and blow Apple out the door. New areas where Spotify is available include South Africa, Israel, Vietnam and Romania, just to name a few, and they’re looking to launch in India, Russia, and Africa.
Spotify Growth Projections
As this report continues, “Across the world, excluding China, an estimated 6% of people with payment-enabled smartphones pay for Spotify.” Morgan Stanley has made the bold prediction that this number could double in five years, which could mean that Spotify could have a whopping 220 million paid subscribers.
They’re also hoping that there will be 53 million paid subscribers in areas such as Asia, the Middle East in Africa. That would be a huge jump considering these areas have 11 million subscribers in 2018.
One in a Million?
As this report tells us, the Danny Ocean success story would have been “a one in a million shot” a long time ago. But with Spotify, YouTube, and other music streams and channels all over the world, artists like Ocean can be found from practically anywhere.
The label executive who signed Ocean indeed discovered him on Spotify. With Latin artists especially, it’s really helped blow up the market, even more than the Latin explosion years back.
And we indeed may be getting into an era where Spotify can help shape the future of music with the help of its world-wide subscribers, and the discovery of new artists all over the globe. What artists will end up leading the world-wide charge remains to be seen, but it could be a remarkable phenomenon to watch this year.