Spotify Business strategy Case Study
Key Learning Outcomes
By the end of the case, students should be able to:
- Understand the broad macro-environment of Spotify and the global music streaming industry in terms of political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal factors (PESTEL/PEST/STEEPLE).
- Use our swot analysis example to gain an overall understanding of Spotify's strengths and weaknesses and strategic options arising from the opportunities and threats that have been identified from the Pestle analysis example on Spotify's business environment.
- To apply strategy business models and frameworks such as Pestle/Pest/Steeple, Swot etc to real company cases.
Analyse the macro environment of Spotify and the global music streaming industry using Pestel and the impact of external factors followed by a Spotify Swot and Porters five forces analysis.
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Spotify is a Swedish multinational music streaming company headquartered in Luxemburg, Stockholm in Sweden. It was founded in 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon (Parsons 2018). In 2017 Spotify’s revenue grew by 40% to 4,090million euros up from 2,952m in 2016 (Statista 2018d; Business Insider Nordic 2018).
With over 70 million subscribers worldwide in 2018, Spotify is the leading music streaming service ahead of major competitors Apple Music and Amazon prime music with 40 million and 16 million subscribers respectively (Reuters 2018). Nevertheless, Apple Music remains the most popular streaming service worldwide (Sanchez 2018).