Spotify Hits 158 Million Paid Subscribers
The achievement represents a 21 percent growth versus the company’s year-ago quarter, according to a press release published on Spotify’s On the Record newsroom.
The company also ended the quarter with 208 million people on the ad-supported version of the service. All in all, Spotify now counts 356 million monthly active users, a 24 percent annual increase. The churn rate was flat vs. the previous quarter.
The company made these and other announcement in a letter to shareholders, available as a PDF document, after reporting earnings for the first quarter of 2021.
Spotify between January and March 2021 managed to pick up nearly four million new subscribers and a total of 11 million customers (both free and paid). This, the company said, “drove healthy double-digit year-over-year growth across all regions and was strong relative to a tough promotional comparison from the first quarter of 2020.”
Spotify’s guidance for the current quarter calls for an additional 4-8 million new paid subscribers, putting its subscriber base in the ballpark of 162-166 million accounts.
Spotify’s Increased Focus on Podcasting
On the other hand, Spotify’s recent price hike across multiple markets could slow down the momentum, eve with new offerings like podcasts—Spotify just unveiled its paid subscription platform for podcasts to rival Apple’s new podcast subscriptions.
Speaking of podcasting, the Spotify-exclusive Joe Rogan Experience podcast “performed above expectations.” Podcast listening saw a “strong increase” although the proportion of people listening to podcasts was “consistent” with the previous quarter, the company said.
This implies that Spotify’s existing user base is spending more hours listening to podcast shows, validating the company’s efforts to double down on podcasts. For those wondering, Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA podcast was the second most popular show on the platform.
What About Apple Music’s Subscriber Base?
The last known metric for Apple’s music service dates back to June 2019 when the company reported passing 60 million paid subscribers.
Apple hasn’t provided an update since that time but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Apple Music has fallen behind Spotify by a large margin. Apple is a company that likes to keep performance metrics like this to itself until the numbers are so impressive that the company cannot resist the urge to share its accomplishments with the world.
Apple Music is also available through the Apple One subscription bundles, which combine other services like Apple Arcade, Apple TV+, iCloud storage, and more for a flat monthly fee.
