Comment by kuschku
14 days ago
And once you've got control of one EU country, expanding to another EU country is just as complicated as expanding to the US is.
So if you're spending the same effort anyway, expanding to the US with 300 million people is much more profitable than expanding to Germany with 80 million people, or the Netherlands with 20 million people.
Which is why Spotify became available in Sweden, the US, and the rest of the EU in that order.
> Which is why Spotify became available in Sweden, the US, and the rest of the EU in that order.
Which is verifiably false.
Spotify launched in 2006, and expanded into the US in 2011. You truly believe that it never expanded in the EU in the intervening 5 years? How then did it launch in the UK in 2009? Or how did it have a million paying customers in the EU by the time they launched in the US?
There's literally a section on the Wikipedia article detailling how it launched in a handful of countries, expanded to the US, and only then expanded to most of the EU:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify#Geographic_availabilit...
Spotify launched in Sweden, Finland, France, Norway, Spain, followed by the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
After the US expansion, Spotify finally expanded to Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia and Switzerland
That means Spotify launched for 222 million europeans, expanded to 300 million US-americans, before becoming available for the remaining 281 europeans.
You'd never see a US company launching e.g. only for Washington, Oregon, California and Nevada, expanding to China, and only afterwards become available in the remaining states.
They launched in 7 countries before launching in the US. In the same year as they launched in the US they also launched in 4 other countries.
In 2012, after their "expansion" in the US they had five times as many paying users outside the US as in the US.
5 replies →