Hard to be too upset about this. Everything’s getting more expensive, and I’m assuming music rights holders have been squeezing Spotify more and more. I’d love to go back to music piracy, but having an enormous library available at a moment’s notice is worth the extra dollar to me. I do have a pretty huge collection of video game music since the big N refuses to license their music
What’s going on with tech, recently?
Netflix cracking down on password sharing, reddit’s API changes, every streaming platform raising their prices, YouTube fighting against adblockers and potentially charging creators for visibility… the list goes on and on, and it seems to be coming from every direction all at once.
Am I missing some huge financial change in the tech investment sphere that has affected Silicon Valley (ie. freakout due to the SVB collapse)?
Or is this just a case of companies seeing each other get away with squeezing consumers, and following suit?
All of them are built on venture capital and borrowing money used to be “free” so investors were fine with borrowing with 0% interest and spending them on all the shiny tech projects. Now with interest rate being 5.25% they all of them all demanding return on their investment and companies that never in their lifetime were profitable are forced to come up with a way to make that money.
I’d love to read more about this, do you have a reference??
A good overview: https://fortune.com/2022/12/28/investing-outlook-2023-fed-interest-rates-stocks-inflation-cheap-money-era/amp/
It’s been the talk since quite some time ago and it’s finally here.
The keyword is “the end of cheap money” if you want to Google some more.
What kind of effect would this have the share prices? I guess for Spotify a $1 isn’t super crazy for people to accept, you’d think it’d rise?
At the very least, profitable companies can maintain their valuation. Unlike, say, Twitter valuation which dropped to a third of what Musk pay for because it’s losing even more money after the takeover.
I love they have to sensationalize the title because if they said “raised prices by a dollar” most folks would wonder why it’s a headline.
