Spotify to Have More Than 400m Users By End of 2021

Spotify expects to have more than 400m monthly active users by the end of this year, according to the latest company report.

The audio streaming platform added 16m monthly active users (+4.4%) in Q3 2021 and expects this quarter-on-quarter growth to accelerate in Q4. The company forecasts its user base to be between 400m and 407m, equal to between a 5.0% to 6.8% increase.

Europe is the largest market for Spotify, where it takes a 34% share of the total (equal to about 129m). North America follows with 24% (91m), while Latin America (22%, 83m) and Rest of World (21%, 79m) are close behind. The company called out India, the Philippines, Indonesia, South Korea, Bangladesh and Pakistan as key areas of growth.

Most of these users are using the free, ad-supported version of Spotify, at 220m in Q3 2021. Paid, ad-free users equalled 161m in the latest quarter.

Although Spotify makes most of its money from ad-free subscriptions, its ad revenue has been growing rapidly – it rose by 74.6% in Q3 2021 to reach $323m, “with the United States and United Kingdom meaningfully exceeding expectations”.

Podcasts have been a key area of growth for Spotify, with podcast advertising revenue growing by triple-digits. As well as this, more users are listening to podcast content and they are also spending longer listening.

Credit: WARC