Case study Spotify
Mustafa Avci
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Information Studies: BIS Track mstfa20@gmail.com Abstract
The physical multimedia shops have been facing a crisis situation. Could crises and opportunities be interconnected to each other? In this paper you get an overview of how this situation folds out to the multimedia market, especially from the viewpoint of the company Spotify. The Cd stores are disappearing from the streets, they go bankrupt.1 The videostores have been having a hard time, in fact the amount of stores in the Netherlands have dimnished from 1300 to 300 in a time of ten years.2
Introduction
Spotify had been in development since 2006, by 'Spotify AB', a company in
Sweden. With Daniel Ek being the founder of the company. The succes of spotify is adressed to the fact that is solved a big problem. Illegal filesharing was a problem and still is. While the music industry was having a peak at
1999 of $27bn, at 2008 it was below $14bn.3 Facing this situation, the big major record labels participated in a collaboration with Spotify and agreed to share their catalogs.
Adaptive Cycle
In which state did Spotify enter the market and is going on now? If we look at the adaptive cycle, (see figure 1) we can say that Spotify entered the market when there was a crisis climate in the branche.

Figure 1 Adaptive Cycle.4

1.1. Crisis situation
We can say that the situation in the multimedia market was in a big uncertainty and in the crisis phase. This is exactly were Spotify started and entered the market. The physical multimedia resellers were at a loss, because they were seeing that there sales were going down with the popularization of internet. In an uncertain and crisis situation there must be change, you cannot live according to your old manners. The people that were buying physical CD's ditched this idea and started to