In brief: Spotify this week said it finished the third quarter with 381 million total monthly active users, an increase of 19 percent year over year and up four percent from the previous quarter. Of those, 172 million are premium subscribers, meaning they pay a monthly fee to use the service without ads. The remaining 220 million monthly active users are ad-supported users, who are subjected to advertising but don’t pay any monthly fee. Of the two, the former is more valuable to Spotify.
Turning to the financials, Spotify’s ad-supported revenue grew 75 percent compared to the same period a year ago. The streaming giant finished the quarter with €2.5 billion ($2.9 billion) in total revenue, up seven percent quarter over quarter and 27 percent year over year.
Spotify said its podcast business did exceedingly well in the third quarter. The platform finished the three-month period with 3.2 million podcasts in its library, adding that podcast share of overall consumption hours reached a new all-time high in Q3.
Looking ahead, the streaming music leader said it expects to finish the year with between 400 million and 407 million monthly active users and as many as 181 million total premium subscribers. Total revenue for Q4 is expected to be between €2.54 billion and €2.68 billion.
Spotify early this year said its users would have access to CD-quality, lossless audio by the end of the year. We’re not quite ready to roll the calendar over just yet, but time is ticking and if Spotify wants to keep its promise, it’ll need to get HiFi in gear soon.
Image credit Alexander Shatov