Spotify has become one of the first platforms of its kind to reach more than 100 million users on a global scale. According to the company, now more than 100 million users around the globe pay for the Spotify Premium services. With this, Spotify has reached a new milestone by growing the paid subscribers by 32% year-on-year. The company also said that if the free users/subscribers are included in the count, the numbers exceeds 217 million globally.
Spotify and its services were earlier not available in India and the company launched its services in the country only in February 2019. And since the app’s launch in India, more than 2 million Indian subscribers have joined the music-streaming service.
With the increasing popularity of Spotify globally, it has made its mark and is ahead of Apple Music. Apple Music is Apple’s streaming service and it has around 50 million paid users globally. But that is literally just half of Spotify’s current paid subscribers. However, according to the Wall Street Journal, in the US, Apple Music has around 28 million subscribers compared to Spotify’s 26 million. In the US, Apple Music has a lead on the music streaming service race, but on a global scale Spotify is miles ahead of the Cupertino-based tech firm’s music streaming service.
With the growth of the company, Spotify is also focusing more on its podcasts and it has planned to develop a better advertising model for podcasts. Targeting, measurement and reporting capabilities will be included in Spotify’s new advertising model for podcasts. The new model of podcast advertising means that the company will let the podcast producers place different ads in a podcast depending on the user it is targeted towards.
Spotify’s focus towards podcasts could be the result of its acquisition of the podcast companies such as Gimlet Media, Anchor and Parcast. All these podcasting companies offer a more than 1,25,000 podcasting titles on the Spotify’s platform. Spotify has also targeted that by the end of the second quarter, it hopes to have 222 to 228 million users globally while the paid subscribers number reaching towards 107 to 110 million. India is also a big market for Spotify and with its launch in the Indian market, the company hopes to achieve the targeted number.
Earlier, Spotify offered to give away a free Google Home Mini Speaker to every family account subscribers and the company has also said that the voice speakers are an important area for its own growth. But even though the company is growing in the subscribers’ department, it is losing money. Spotify posted a loss of $158.3 million from January to March 2019. If we compare the loss to the same quarter last year, we see that from January to March 2018, the company lost around $188.55 million.
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