Spotify becomes first music streaming service to surpass 200 million subscribers
The music giant hit 205 million at the end of December 2022
Image: Spencer Platt / Getty
Spotify has become the first ever music streaming platform to surpass 200 million subscribers.
Spotify hit the 205 million paid subscriber milestone on 31 December 2022. According to an earnings release shared recently by The Verge, this marks a 14 per cent increase from the previous year.
The streaming service also saw a significant rise in the number of non-premium Spotify subscribers, with its overall monthly active users growing by 20 per cent to 489 million, which is said to have surpassed “the company’s expectations”.
Competitor figures shared by Musically suggest that Apple Music had around 60 million paid subscribers and Amazon Music 55 million at the last count for each.
Despite this huge success, the news of such impressive figures comes just days after the brand announced it was laying off six per cent of its staff. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said in a post to Spotify’s newsroom: “We hoped to sustain the strong tailwinds from the pandemic and believed that our broad global business and lower risk to the slowdown of ads would insulate us.”
He continued, “I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth… and to bring our costs more in line, we’ve made the difficult but necessary decision to reduce our number of employees.
“I take full accountability for the move that got us here today,” he concluded.
You can read the full Q4 report from Spotify here.
