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Business News Deals Digital
Spotify buys subscriber insights firm, relaunches website for artists
By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 3 November 2016
Spotify has bought a company called Preact that uses analytics, metrics and good old machine learning to identify how to better sign up new subscribers and retain the ones you’ve got. Which is certainly knowledge that would be useful for a subscriptions-based business, and especially one that is very keen to find ways to persuade its loss-leading freemium users to become paying customers.
“Finding the trends and behaviour patterns in our data that correlate with paid subscriptions is incredibly valuable”, the streaming firm’s VP Of Product Jason Richman said while confirming the acquisition. “The addition of Preact to Spotify’s team will help us design experiences that grow our premium customer base”.
Preact was founded in LA in 2012 before relocated to San Francisco. The start-up raised somewhere between $12.5 million and $16.7 million in investment, depending on who you ask, and was originally pitched as a B2B insight provider to subscription-based businesses. It’s not clear if it will continue to work for other clients too now that it is owned by Spotify and will operate from its parent company’s offices, though TechCrunch suggests it may have stopped doing that already about a year ago.
Elsewhere in Spotify news, the streaming firm has relaunched its website aimed at artists, with the company’s recently appointed Global Head Of Creator Services Troy Carter stating in a blog post that “we’re shifting the purpose of this website from detailing the mechanics of streaming to helping artists maximise the opportunity it’s created”.