Sunday Updates: Soul Cycle Chooses Violence, Tracy Jordan, SPOT (Issue #17)
Recent Updates:
Peloton Interactive (NASDAQ: PTON — $3.2 billion) Soul Cycle is now offering to exchange anyone’s Peloton bikes for 47 in-person Soul Cycle classes under their “Soul Reunited” program. This was launched 4 days ago and is only open to the first 100 people to sign up. It is clearly targeted toward Peloton. However, the effects shouldn’t be as detrimental as they would at first glance. First off, the limit to 100 bikes is only mentioned later in their press release (this optimizes the headline for drama). Second Peloton prides itself on the core of customers who are champions of the brand. Most customers would rather keep the bike. Essentially this media stunt is trying to use 100 people (an insignificant number in the space) to make waves. At the end of the day, Peloton has no limit to the number of users or where those users are based. Soul Cycle has both of those problems making it not have a real ability to compete with Peloton.
Yes, Soul Cycle does have some scalable tech under the Equinox umbrella, but their focus is still clearly on the in-person meaning they sacrifice their ability to compete on the tech front in this case.
Spotify Technology (NYSE: SPOT — $21.77 billion) had 433 million active monthly users (MAUs) in Q2 2022 which beat their estimate of 428 million MAUs. Now Spotify has reported seeing 450 million MAUs in Q3 so far.
CFO reports they saw some “weakness” in ad sales in the last 2 weeks of the quarter. In spite of this ad-supported revenue grew by 31% in that quarter. This is in the face of companies like Snap (Snapchat owner) warning of advertising money becoming harder to come by. Currently, only 13% of Spotify’s revenue comes from ad-supported. The majority of their revenue comes from their 188 million premium users.
Spotify beat and raised in revenue, MAUs, and premium users. The only category that was not beaten was gross margin which the company missed by less than a percentage point. The future guidance is still being maintained. Their goals for Q3 2022 include:
~$3 billion in revenue
450 million MAUs
194 million premium users
25.2% gross margin (this is in line with expectations)
Alternative Streaming Index:
For those of you who missed it last week. There is now a new segment in the Sunday Updates, Alternative Streaming Index. This is where you see the performance of the index since it was started (June 17th) and YTD. This section also includes links about where you can find deep dives for each of the companies in the index.
To hear more about what the index is go here
To see the full spreadsheet with links to deep dives go here
Streaming News:
Shark Week hosted the Impractical Jokers, Jackass, and Tracy Morgan (sitting next to his home aquarium). The master of ceremonies was also The Rock. All still available on Discovery+
NFL+ and Premium NFL+ have officially been launched this past week. They cost $4.99/mo or $39.99/yr and $9.99/mo or $79.99/yr for NFL+ and Premium NFL+ (respectively). Both are ad-free on most non-live content. Premium adds some additional content for the increased fee.
Final streaming news: If you didn’t catch the F1 race in Hungary this morning make sure to check it out. It was a good one. Go George Russell and Forza Ferrari!
Tweets Of The Week:
Edwin gets it:
Until Thursday,
Soren