Spotify gained 36 million monthly active users in the past quarter. This is 21 million more than expected. The platform has never had so many active users in a quarter. The net loss also grew, to 302 million euros.
The company now has 551 million monthly active users , up 27 percent from a year earlier. The majority of these, 343 million subscribers, have a free account. The new users were mainly free users. The number of free users increased by more, 8 percent, than the number of subscribers, which increased by 5 percent.
While Spotify makes money from free users through ads, Premium subscribers bring in a lot more money for the company. Free users earned Spotify $404 million in the quarter, while Premium subscribers earned the company $2.77 billion. The company’s total turnover was 3.18 billion euros, 4 percent more than last quarter and 11 percent more than a year earlier. The net loss was 302 million euros. This is 34 percent more than last quarter and more than double the loss of the same quarter a year ago.
According to the company, that larger loss is due to the termination of several podcast shows, the “streamlining” of the company’s real estate and severance payments. Apart from those costs, the loss was actually better than expected, the company writes. Spotify therefore speaks of a strong second quarter. The quarterly figures follow a day after Spotify’s announcement to increase the prices of the Premium subscriptions by up to three euros , depending on the subscription.