I'm no expert in running or investing in a Dot Com business, but amazon a company I've followed and admired since '96 who started in '95 took 6 years to make a profit - 2001.
If you and I invested £1000 in amazon at IPO stage I don't think we would be too

now!
If I understand correctly... Amazon didn't
post a profit in the early years because they spent every dime they made on expanding their business. They made a profit... but they invested that extra money back into themselves. That was a
choice they made... and it worked out for them.
Spotify doesn't make a profit
at all because it costs them MORE to acquire the music than the money they get from customers. They don't have a choice. There is no "extra" money to play with.
For instance... if Spotify gets $3.1 billion in revenue... it actually costs them $3.
5 billion to pay the record labels for royalties and to run their company. (a $400 million loss)
And those losses have gotten bigger every year... despite their growing userbase.
In short... Spotify's business model is broken. Would you agree?
There is no opportunity for Spotify to make a profit when their
costs exceed their
revenue. And simply adding more users hasn't helped in the 9 years they've been around.
While Spotify is now up to 60 million paying customers... they also now have 80 million free customers. That's a big part of the problem.
If Spotify got rid of the free tier... they
might be able to make a profit. Who knows.
Or... maybe streaming music simply isn't a profitable business because of the insane royalty costs.
Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft could afford to lose money on streaming music because they have other profitable businesses. And they would just use streaming music as a "value add" for their other products.
But Spotify's business
is streaming music. They don't have anything
else to fall back on.