Spotify’s Grand Tour Lets Rivals Infiltrate Its Valuable Backyard
So-called land grabs are a feature of internet booms. Capitalists become overexcited and dole out money like confetti to entrepreneurs who persuade them that their business is vastly scalable. They do so even when the price of achieving this omnipresence is a long period of heavy loss.
The willingness to bet on metrics unrelated to financial returns is one reason why the unwinding of these manias tends to be so painful. Companies that had been thought to be lossmaking for a purpose turn out to be, well, merely lossmaking. Those that can retrench do so. Those that cannot often go into irreversible decline.
Source: FT.com