Spotify Statistics: Users, Usage, Revenue (2020 Report)

Spotify Technology S.A is a media service providing company now operating worldwide. Two Swedish entrepreneurs Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon founded Spotify in 2006. Initially, Spotify was only an audio streaming platform. It used to provide DRM-protected music, videos, and podcasts from record labels and local companies.

On 7th October 2008, the owners officially launched Spotify. As of now, it has covered 50 million tracks and featured parameter wise searching options.

Users and Listening Statistics of Spotify

  • As of today, 271 million people actively using Spotify every month.
  • Among the 271 million users, it has 124 million paid subscribers.
  • Average users listen to 41 different artists on Spotify in a week.
  • In a month, users are spending around 25 hours of streaming music on Spotify.
  • From all users, 44% use Spotify on an everyday basis.
  • Ed Sheeran is the most famous artist on Spotify, with 6.3 billion streams.
  • “Shape of you,” sang by Ed Shareen is the most streamed song with having what close to 2 billion listeners.
  • The most followed artist on Spotify is Ed Sheeran, with 28 million followers.
  • Drake holds the record of most monthly streams with 43 million.
  • The first song to have 1 billion streams on Spotify is “One Dance,” the artists involved in this song were Drake, WizKid, and Kyla.
  • Users are spending an averagely of 148 minutes every day for streaming on Spotify.
  • 48% of Spotify users have utilized Pandora a few times per month.
  • 1 million people have installed the Lite version.
  • From the total users, 13.55% have joined through their Facebook accounts.
  • So far, 25 tracks on Spotify have reached one billion plus streams.
  • Thirty-five million user-generated playlists have emoji on their titles.
  • Drake is the artist with the highest number of emoji on the Spotify app.
  • The highest number of plays took place on 3rd March 2017; the song name was “More life,” and the artist was Drake.
  • The song “Thinking Out Loud,” sang by Ed Shareen, was the first-ever track to reach 500 million streams on Spotify.
  • There are half-a-million podcasts available on Spotify as of now.
  • Approximately one-third of the listening time on Spotify is for Spotify-generated playlists and another one third for user-generated playlists.
  • Around 20 million people listen to the playlist, “Today’s top hits.”
  • The “RapCavier” and “Latino Heat” playlists have 10 and 9 million listeners, respectively.

Financial Statistics of Spotify

  • In the first quarter of 2019, Spotify earned a total of $1.68 billion, from which $1.55 billion obtained from premium subscribers.
  • In the first quarter of 2019, it has generated $432 million gross revenue, which included a $53 million operating loss.
  • An artist earns $0.006 to $0.0084 from one Spotify stream.
  • Valuation done in April 2018 confirmed Spotify worth $25 billion.
  • In May 2019, the market cap of Spotify was $26.5 billion, and it remained the same for the next six months.
  • The highest ever market cap of Spotify was $35 billion evaluated in July 2018.
  • In the year 2018, Spotify scooped a sum of $6 billion in revenue.
  • For the same year, the net loss was $48 billion.
  • For the year 2018, the company invested $560 million in R&D.
  • In the 3rd quarter of 2019, the total revenue was $1.9 billion.
  • The research and development cost for 2018 was $537 million.
  • To date, Spotify has paid $5 billion to labels, publishers, and artists to astern copyright of their music.
  • For 2014 the annual revenue was $1.18 billion, and net loss was $204 million.
  • The revenue for 2015 was $2.11 billion, and net loss for the same year was $250 million.
  • In 2016 the sum of revenue was $3.16 billion, and the net loss was $587 million.
  • The revenue was $4.45 billion for the year 2017, with a net loss of $1.344 billion.
  • For the year 2018, they raised revenue of $5.72 billion and suffered a net loss of $85 million.
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Usage parameters:

  • Users can locate tracks by browsing genres,
  • Artists
  •  
  • It allows users to create, edit, and share playlists.
  • Spotify is accessible from almost all countries of Europe, North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, and several countries of Africa and Asia.

Spotify is available on every modern-day device, including Windows, macOS, and Linux computers, iOS, and Android smartphones and tablets.

  • Spotify has 271 million monthly active users
  • 124 million paid subscribers as of today.

Although it has headquarters in every different region, the international headquarter is in Stockholm, Sweden. The New York Stock Exchange has listed Spotify since February 2018. It follows the freemium business model, which means it provides the basic features free. For special features, it asks for subscriptions. The revenue arises through subscriptions and advertising agreements from 3rd parties.

Spotify – Down the road:

Since its foundation in 2006, Spotify has been through various historical events. The name had derived from a pretty dramatic incident. The company opened its branch in the United Kingdom in February 2009. Primarily they allowed free public registration, which led to massive web traffic outbreaks. In September 2009, they shut down the free registration service due to massive traffic issues.

In July 2011, Spotify took another significant step forward by entering the United States. They offered free service for six months, and in January 2012, the free period was cut short. From January to March of that year, users were only allowed to access Spotify for 10 hours in a month for free. In March 2012, they officially declared the end of the free usage.

As the company picking up the height, the co-owners wrote a letter to Sweden’s ruling political party in April 2016. In the application, they mentioned the three attributes that were preventing Spotify from hiring top talented individuals. The three demands they urged were access to flexible housing, amplifying programming education, and revolutionizing stock options.

Crossing all the hurdles, the company launched its biggest marking campaign ever during the final months of 2016. They achieved monumental success by establishing exhaustive billboards in different metropolitan cities of the world. The billboards caught the attention by comically mocking users’ listening habits.

Further, in February 2017, Spotify expanded its United States project. They spread the roots in Lower Manhattan, New York City, and 4 World Trade Center. They offered around 1000 new job vacancies and preserved 832 existing positions. Once again, on 14th November 2018, Spotify held a conference where they reviled the opening of 13 new markets in the MENA region. The notable updates in that announcement were the newly establishment of an Arabic hub, some playlist, and right-to-left texting facility in their apps.

Why has Spotify become so popular?

How Spotify has been successful in reaching to the top among all the online music streaming apps since the first day of its launch was a surprise to industrial pundits. It has been possible mainly because of the significant features Spotify offers to users. They are offering excellent user-friendly services and allows users to get in touch with a broad catalog of music only by a few touches. Let’s describe some chief reasons that have made Spotify the best in the business.

  • Exclusive products: Spotify is unmatchable because of the uniqueness of its products. No other app has encompassed the extensive catalog of music like Spotify.
  • Worldwide listeners: To date, Spotify has possessed 50 million-plus songs and allows users from almost all over the world to access those. Anyone from any nook of the planet can listen to his favorite song using Spotify.
  • Establishing a community through music: Spotify has revolutionized the virtual music industry. As music has its own superpower to bring people together, Spotify has taken full advantage of it. They grant listeners to create their playlist according to genre, mood, season, occasion, location, etc.
  • Seamless music hub: One of the exclusive features that have soared the popularity of Spotify is its seamless streaming of music on any smartphone, computer, television, and speakers. They have already executed the next generation technology through the smart assistant speaker.
  • The Iconic freemium model: To gain revenue, Spotify has introduced an attractive freemium model. Under this rule, users will enjoy the services free with decent sound quality and ads on the app. To improve sound quality and experience, ad-free service users have to buy subscriptions.

Demographic and some Factual Statistics of Spotify:

  • Spotify alone covers 36% of the entire streaming market globally.
  • 52% of the total Spotify users stream music on their smartphones.
  • From every 10 Spotify users, there are six females and four males.
  • Spotify is more prevalent among people of 25-34-year-olds than any other age group.
  • The number of Spotify users in the United States is 26 million.
  • There are 2 million users of Spotify in India.
  • Four thousand forty employees are working worldwide for Spotify.
  • 72% of Spotify users are millennials.
  • 45% of total users are male, while 55% are females.
  • So far, Spotify has acquired 17 organizations, including the like of PReact, Sonalytics, Anchor, Parcast, and SoundBetter.
  • Spotify is available on multiple platforms than Android and iPhone. One can access Spotify from macOS computers and Microsoft Windows.
  • As of this moment, Spotify is accessible in 79 countries.
  • Spotify Lite is available for 22 countries.
  • The United States has 14.47% of the total Spotify users, which is the highest from one country.
  • Among all Spotify users, 18.45% migrated from Pandora. 45% of Pandora users have switched over to Spotify until now.
  • Users tune to Spotify for 148 minutes every day.
  • Around 10% of the Adults in The United States run Spotify many times in a week.
  • 17% of the Spotify playlists are personalized.
  • From the 50 million tracks, any user hasn’t played 20%.
  • Users have to consume only ten mega bites to install the Spotify lite app.
  • For a minute of high-quality streaming, it will require 2.44 megabytes of data, and for an hour, it requires 144 megabytes of data.
  • For standard quality streaming, 1.2 megabytes data needed per minute and 72 megabytes data required per hour.

Future of Spotify:

Spotify believes that they have a long way to go. Their ultimate target is to have users in every single country on the surface of planet earth on its platform. Starting from Sweden now, the company has spread across 79 countries, which is quite impressive. Since the foundation, Spotify has been able to come along roadmap with utmost precision, and they are hoping to repeat the same for years to come.

The future vision is to implement more and more artificial intelligence appliances. The blueprint for the next decade comprises major changeovers. In various conferences, the plan makers of Spotify have hinted about how the company aims to walk ahead in terms of applying technology. The programmers are promisingly operating for regularly upgrading the application to make as much user-friendly as possible.

Spotify has completely revolutionized the scenario of online music streaming. They don’t want to stop digging deep and invent more exciting features to make everything super easy for the users.

Besides being technical experts, the promoters are phenomenal business professionals. They know how to expand the business cycle and achieve remarkable success. By acknowledging the importance of customer satisfaction, Spotify has been in the move to incorporate new features with the flow of time. What is satisfying the users now will surely not enough to fulfill their wants in the future. When people like your service, they will demand new tastes in the future. If the company fails to provide something new regularly, people will start to decline the service.

Considering the changing habit of customers’ taste Spotify always pursues to add something extra and unprecedented with the products. In the future, they are going to do precisely the same thing and extend their market into more and more countries. The executives hope the steady growth rate in getting users and earning revenue will continue for an extended timeframe. While focusing deep into the future, the officials have not forgotten about keeping enough backup. There will always be chances of uncertain losses in the future, but to make up that Spotify has prepared a solid back up plan.

Researched by Brian and SaaS Scout team
Researched by Brian and SaaS Scout team

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