Spotify: 365 million users listening to more and more podcasts

Spotify also published its quarterly figures for the second quarter of 2021 today. The Swedish audio streaming service currently has 165 million premium subscribers worldwide and a total of 365 million monthly active users. The podcast sector continues to grow.

User growth overall below expectations

While the second quarter gained nearly 7 million premium subscribers, a 20 percent year-over-year increase and on the upper end of expectations, 9 million monthly active users grew 22 percent to 365 million. The year-over-year comparison lags behind Spotify’s own predictions. What is unusual is that the number of premium users, at 7 million, grew significantly faster than the number of users of the free, ad-funded version, which had only 2 million new users. For the full year, targets were 407 million monthly active users and 177 million premium subscribers, down from 422.

Advertising revenue up but still losing

However, the advertising revenue forecast was again exceeded in the second quarter of 2021. Compared to the same quarter last year, Spotify reported a 110 percent increase in ad sales to EUR 275 million, with podcast marketing achieving the highest sales growth. In terms of sales, Spotify grew 23 percent in the second quarter to 2.33 billion euros. After deducting ad sales, premium users account for about 2 billion euros. After a profit of 23 million euros in the first quarter, there was a loss of 20 million euros on the books again at the end of the second quarter. In the previous year, the loss in the second quarter was significantly higher at 356 million euros.

podcast development continues

There was an overall 95 percent increase in podcast usage in the second quarter compared to the same quarter last year. Podcast usage per user increased by more than 30 percent compared to the previous year. New record prices were also achieved for the duration of the podcast on a weekly and monthly basis. The share of podcast usage in total Spotify usage has also reached an all-time high. Of the total 2.9 million podcasts, over 70,000 are German-language formats, meaning that the number of German-language podcasts has more than tripled since February 2020.