Spotify, the music streaming service, has managed to reach another milestone in terms of paid subscribers, and this time around, the company has hit 50 million paid subscribers. This news first surfaced after a tweet was posted by the official Spotify account on Twitter which stated, “Thank you to our 50 million subscribers.”. As Spotify has over a 100 million monthly active users, this could only mean that Spotify was referencing its paid subscribers. While the music streaming service is free of charge, there is an additional premium service which will remove all ads and comes with a number of other features, at a cost of course.
This growth in terms of paid subscribers is pretty impressive for Spotify, considering the music streaming service just passed 40 million paid subscribers back in September of 2016. With the latest milestone achieved, this means Spotify took less than six months to gain 10 million paid subscribers. If this figure is broken down further, the streaming service gained an average of 1.6 million paid subscribers each month, since September last year. This is certainly no small figure, and proves that people are indeed willing to pay for a premium music streaming service. Spotify first announced that it had 15 million paying subscribers in January of 2015, and that number quickly doubled within 14 months, to 30 million. It also seems that Spotify is taking shorter time periods to achieve milestones in terms of its paid subscribers.
Spotify happens to be a Swedish company, and has been around for over a decade, but it only launched its popular music streaming mobile app back in 2011. The company boasts over 500 million users, though only around 100 million of those users are active users. Spotify is also pretty dominant in the music streaming service industry, with its closest rival being Apple Music, which only had 20 million subscribers back in December of 2016, according to an official update from Apple themselves. While Spotify may boast an impressive user base, the service it runs isn’t as profitable as it seems. The company mainly relies on ad revenue, and paid subscribers to turn a profit, but a huge chunk of that goes to paying artists, and the company has been recording losses for many years now. However, that might change if Spotify chooses to go for an initial public offering (IPO).