That really makes it sound like being unprofitable is a choice rather than an inevitable reckoning with a fundamental unsustainability of the business.

Yeah, for a while it is a choice. Finding an audience, finding a customer base, finding product/market fit, all of these things take time. But after a while that choice gets taken away. If Spotify doesn't start making money soon, its investors probably won't stick around much longer.

Seems to me that most tech companies don't get to survive their "unprofitability" for so long.

A massive subscriber number absolves a lot of sins. Not unprofitability, though; at least not for very long. Hence .