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    Streaming service Spotify hits 100 million paid user mark

    By SHOOTUpdated:No Comments751 Views
    COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) --

    Music streaming service Spotify said Monday that its paying subscribers have reached 100 million for the first time, up 32% on the year and almost twice the latest figures for Apple Music.

    The Stockholm-based company called the figure, which was reached during the first three months of 2019, "an important milestone."

    The growth was driven, among other things, by "a better-than-planned promotion in the U.S. and Canada." Spotify said it had reached "the high end of our guidance range of 97-100 million."

    By comparison, archrival Apple Music had about 50 million paying subscribers at the end of 2018, the latest available figures. Apple is expected to release new figures with its earnings report on Tuesday.

    The number of Spotify's total monthly users, which includes those who do not pay a monthly subscription fee but use the service with intermittent ads, rose to 217 million in the first quarter.

    The strong growth in its user base led to a 33% rise in revenue, to 1.5 billion euros ($1.7 billion). Yet like many tech companies focusing on building market share, the company continued to lose money, reporting an operating loss of 47 million euros.

    Spotify says that voice speakers like Google Home and Alexa are a "critical area of growth" and is looking to invest more in podcasts to supplement its offering of music.

    Tags:Spotify



    Raoul Peck Resurrects A Once-Forgotten Anti-Apartheid Photographer In “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found”

    Friday, November 22, 2024

    When the photographer Ernest Cole died in 1990 at the age of 49 from pancreatic cancer at a Manhattan hospital, his death was little noted.

    Cole, one of the most important chroniclers of apartheid-era South Africa, was by then mostly forgotten and penniless. Banned by his native country after the publication of his pioneering photography book "House of Bondage," Cole had emigrated in 1966 to the United States. But his life in exile gradually disintegrated into intermittent homelessness. A six-paragraph obituary in The New York Times ran alongside a list of death notices.

    But Cole receives a vibrant and stirring resurrection in Raoul Peck's new film "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found," narrated in Cole's own words and voiced by LaKeith Stanfield. The film, which opens in theaters Friday, is laced throughout with Cole's photographs, many of them not before seen publicly.

    As he did in his Oscar-nominated James Baldwin documentary "I Am Not Your Negro," the Haitian-born Peck shares screenwriting credit with his subject. "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" is drawn from Cole's own writings. In words and images, Peck brings the tragic story of Cole to vivid life, reopening the lens through which Cole so perceptively saw injustice and humanity.

    "Film is a political tool for me," Peck said in a recent interview over lunch in Manhattan. "My job is to go to the widest audience possible and try to give them something to help them understand where they are, what they are doing, what role they are playing. It's about my fight today. I don't care about the past."

    "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" is a movie layered with meaning that goes beyond Cole's work. It asks questions not just about the societies Cole documented but of how he was treated as an artist,... Read More

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