Apple Music

Spotify beats Apple Music to 100 million paid subscribers

But they’re still losing money.

by
Murtaza Islam
April 29, 2019

Image: Unsplash

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Believe it or not, more than 100 million users worldwide now pay for Spotify Premium. Spotify’s 2019 Q1 Earnings report, which published earlier today, backs that up.

They got here thanks to an impressive 32-percent per year growth in paid subscribers. When you combine the number of users who are not paying for Spotify Premium, you get a total of 217 million monthly active users worldwide. (Yes, this figure also includes the number of users present in India)

Now, this figure puts Spotify way ahead of Apple Music. At the beginning of April, Apple Music reportedly had 50 million paid users worldwide, putting Spotify an estimated 50 million users ahead of its closest competitor. However, this is the case globally. In the US market, believe it or not, Apple Music is actually winning and is in the lead with 28 million subscribers compared to Spotify’s 26 million.

Now with the recently published report, we can also see Spotify’s growing interest in podcasts.

The company states that it wants to develop a better advertising model for podcasts with better “targeting, measurement, and reporting capabilities.” This tells us that Spotify wants to create new ways of letting podcast creators to place different ads in their podcast depending on the user, similar to the way ads are played when music is streamed on the platform. Spotify has also recently acquired Gimlet Media, Anchor, and Parcast – which are all podcasting companies.

Spotify expects to have around 222 to 228 million users (107 and 110 million paid subscribers) by the end of the current quarter. Despite the insane amount of users that Spotify has, they are still operating at a loss. The report published today indicated a loss of €142 million ($158.3 million) for the January to March quarter.

Are you one of the many Spotify users? Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.