The hugely popular and widely successful music streaming app, Spotify, has been around for over a decade but only launched its mobile app in 2011. Since then, it has managed to gain millions of users, boasting up to half a billion users, though only about 100 million of those are active users. While the streaming service is free of charge, there is an additional premium service which will remove all ads, at a cost of course. Those who opt to pay for this premium service are known as paying subscribers. Well, out of those 100 million active users, Spotify now boasts 40 million paying subscribers who pay $10 a month, a new milestone for the company.
Daniel Ek, who happens to be the co-founder of Spotify, tweeted on Twitter today, stating that the service has now hit 40 million paying subscribers. This comes three months after the company reported that it has 100 million active monthly users, and at that time, the service had around 30 million paying subscribers. Nothing regarding its user base was released by the company since then, till a few weeks back when Spotify mentioned that it had reached 39 million paying subscribers. Well, it was only a matter of time before the company hit 40 million paying subscribers. This goes to show that more and more of Spotify’s users are willing to pay for the premium service which will allow them to stream unlimited tracks and all without the interruption of annoying ads.
The Swedish company is growing fast, having passed 15 million paying subscribers in January of 2015. It took the company just 14 months since then to double its paying subscribers figures to 30 million. Now, it has taken just half a year to bring that value up to 40 million. Of course, the growth of Spotify hasn’t come without any problems, as there have been vocal artists who believe that Spotify, as well as other streaming platforms, do not pay them a large-enough share of their revenues. However, Spotify has stated that it pays out a hefty chunk of its earnings to artists and their record labels. According to Reuters, the streaming service reportedly pays artists around 80 percent of its earnings.