Spotify surpasses 500 million user mark
Spotify takes it up a notch and announcement now have 515 million active users worldwide. This represents an increase of 22% compared to the first quarter of 2022. This is well beyond expectations.
Half a billion users on Spotify
Analysts expected a total number of 501.54 million active users. Recent advertising campaigns explain this success, claims Spotify.
But the group considerably widened its operating loss from January to March 2023, posting a loss of 156 million euros linked in particular to restructuring costs and social charges, against a loss of 6 million euros in the first quarter of 2022. The music streaming service’s turnover, driven by the rise in the number of subscribers, jumped 14% in the first quarter of this year, to 3 billion euros. It is nevertheless lower than the expectations of analysts who were counting on 3.4 billion euros.
The number of paying subscribers increased by 15% over the period, to 210 million, better than the 207 million expected by analysts, driven according to the group by good growth in all regions and particularly in Latin America.
“We had our best first quarter since our IPO in 2018, with almost all of our performance indicators exceeding our expectations”, welcomed Spotify. The platform was occasionally profitable in certain quarters. But it regularly shows losses, despite a dazzling growth in the number of its subscribers.
Still no HiFi offer
However, there is one missing today: the availability of the HiFi offer. Indeed, Spotify does not always give a release date, while the group had mentioned this support for the first time in February… 2021. If we are to believe a service manager, it is still planned, but it is not there is no other information.
There are rumors behind the scenes that Spotify has been disrupted by Apple Music and Amazon Music. Indeed, these two have launched an equivalent of the HiFi offer (i.e. lossless audio) at no additional cost to their subscribers. At Spotify, the initial plan was to charge an additional cost.
