I believe the article cited 15% rather than 30% for subscriptions, or 11% if you process your own payments. So [.15, .11] —> [.04, .00], or an overall discount of 11% off subscription revenue they take through the platform.
It sounded to me that, in exchange for that favorable per-subscription rate, Spotify paid $50,000,000 into a “success fund,” whatever that means. $50mm / .11 = $454mm... sounds like they’re basically paying the equivalent of Play Store commission on half a billion’s worth of revenue, without any guarantee that they’ll actually be able to sell that much new growth through Play Store. That feels like sharing the risk in a way that isn’t too out of the domain of reason.
From [0], they added about $2bn in revenue year-on-year in 2022. Although we don’t know the term of this Play Store agreement (or what a “success fund” is), paying an amount equivalent to the normal commission on 1/5 of that total annual growth figure seems like a pretty nontrivial amount to commit.
It sounded to me that, in exchange for that favorable per-subscription rate, Spotify paid $50,000,000 into a “success fund,” whatever that means. $50mm / .11 = $454mm... sounds like they’re basically paying the equivalent of Play Store commission on half a billion’s worth of revenue, without any guarantee that they’ll actually be able to sell that much new growth through Play Store. That feels like sharing the risk in a way that isn’t too out of the domain of reason.
From [0], they added about $2bn in revenue year-on-year in 2022. Although we don’t know the term of this Play Store agreement (or what a “success fund” is), paying an amount equivalent to the normal commission on 1/5 of that total annual growth figure seems like a pretty nontrivial amount to commit.
[0] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/spotify-statistics/