"Up until this point, Spotify has been able to grow and turn a blind eye to the underlying economics of the business," Mark Mulligan of MIDiA Research, a media and technology consultancy, said in a phone interview from London. "But if Spotify can't get its rates down, it has to find other ways to drive profitability, and that's where Spotify may need to do a Netflix and start to acquire its own content and behave more like a record label."