The quote appears in a Fortune analysis of the company’s history and current prospects.
Spotify is pinning its hopes on its diversification into podcasting, and emerging markets.
As one music industry exec with continued ties to the company puts it: “Spotify is one fail away from becoming less relevant.”
But the company is behind Apple Music in that international expansion: Spotify is in 79 markets, Apple more than 110.
“Japan has been a very physical market,” she says. “We have the ability and opportunity to show them things they haven’t seen before.”
The land of the rising sun isn’t the only place where Spotify believes it can dazzle new users. The music industry considers at least a third of the top 10 global music markets to be immature when it comes to streaming adoption, either because of a lingering love of CDs (Japan) or lagging technical infrastructure (Brazil).
Streaming music is on track to represent the majority of total music industry income at some point this year.
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