Spotify Surpasses 500 Million Active Users: The Secrets Behind Its Massive Growth

The company’s official report from the 1st quarter of 2023 pointed out that the number of monthly active users hit 515 million, which is 15 million more than they predicted. By the end of Q2, they plan on reaching 530M monthly active users.
Let’s unravel what’s behind the company’s success and how they plan on expanding the business even more.

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spotify 2023

Illustration: MilicaM

Spotify’s milestones 2023 

According to LinkedIn News, Spotify has been named the #1 company to grow your career in Sweden. Moreover, the world’s largest talent company Randstad named Spotify the most attractive employer in Sweden for the second year in a row. 

As a matter of fact, they’re so proud of what they’ve built over the years that they’ve recently published an HR book called “BOLD: Strategic HR in a new era”. 

As presented in the First Quarter 2023 Earnings Report, this has been the company’s strongest quarter since going public in 2018, exceeding all expectations: 

  • Monthly Active Users grew by 22% year-over-year to 515 million driven by strength in both developed and developing markets, and nearly all age groups.  
  • Premium Subscribers grew 15% year-over-year to 210 million with outperformance across all regions, led by Europe and Latin America. 
  • Total Revenue grew 14% year-over-year to €3.0 billion, led by Subscriber gains. 
  • Gross Margin finished at 25.2%, reflecting improved music and podcast profitability. 
spotify 2023

Not only that, but Spotify has launched a handful of innovative features over the past twelve months, which we’ll talk about more as follows. 

What contributed to the growth? 

Expansion into new markets 

The biggest market expansion happened in February 2021, when Spotify unlocked a potential 1B audience and made itself available in 80+ new markets around the world, adding 36 languages to the platform. 

Moreover, this expansion made available discovering new genres easier, such as K-pop or reggaeton, on the platform. 

Strategic partnerships 

From analyzing their Q1 activities, one more trend is noticeable. 

The bigger the company, the more diverse services it wants to offer to its users. We’ve seen it with Facebook and many others; their goal is to become an “omni” app so that users wouldn’t ever have to leave. 

A similar pattern is happening with Spotify right now: it wants to enable creators on the platform to monetize their content without leaving the platform. Namely, they’ve partnered with Patreon to allow podcasters to offer Patreon-exclusive content to listeners on Spotify. 

spotify charts

Innovative features 

During this quarter, Spotify launched a beta version of AI DJ to users in North America to allow for deeper discovery and personalization. AI DJ combines the power of Spotify personalization technology with cutting-edge generative AI and a realistic AI voice-enabled by technology from their previous acquisition of Sonantic. 

The DJ currently attracts millions of active users each week, representing more than 25% of user consumption on days when they listen to the DJ. 

Personalized user experience 

What we haven’t mentioned so far is the great redesigned user experience on the platform, one of the biggest changes since the initial launch. 

Here’s what they said about the redesign decisions: 

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With this new design, we’re giving fans an even more active role in the audio discovery process and giving creators even more space to share their work. Powered by advanced recommendations, new visual canvases and a completely new and interactive design, we’re making discovering new audio easier than ever before, helping introduce users to their next favorite artist, podcast or book.

Q1 Report, page 19 

The competitive landscape 

So, how are other competitors in the industry doing? 

And, if Spotify grew its number of users and subscribers, does that mean it managed to steal it from another player? 

Service Monthly active users Subscribers 
Deezer 16M 5M 
Apple Music 95M Unverified info 
Amazon Music 68M Unverified info 
YouTube 2.6B  >80M 
Tidal 6.7M Unknown 

Considering that music services are offering a more or less similar experience, players need to invest in innovative features to differentiate themselves from other competitors. 

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The major competitors in the audio and music streaming industry offer a similar experience and have a similar price point. All major competitors can provide a similar catalog of music and podcasts. This, in addition to low switching costs, increases industry rivalry as it is easy for customers to switch services.

Scholar Paper “Spotify: Strategic Plan and Analysis” 

Apart from other streaming services, Spotify’s competition is podcasting platforms as well. That’s why, the company decided to enhance its presence on the market by relaunching its Spotify for Podcasters platform and Anchor acquisition, one of the most commonly used services by podcast creators. 

And of course, they’ve adopted short-form, engaging video format, popularized on TikTok and Instagram Reels, and launched Spotify Clips. 

But what we didn’t see coming is a documentary based on one of the most popular playlists on Spotify, “RapCaviar”. This docu-series simply called “RapCaviar Presents” is a six-episode documentary on Hulu exploring the music and lives of rap’s biggest stars. 

This is only to show that Spotify aims to expand its business to other industries as well, such as the filming industry, and make itself visible to users worldwide. So, if you’ve managed to successfully ignore its dominance over other music streaming platforms, it will invade your favorite TV show streaming services like Hulu and others. 

Apparently, the ultimate goal is to come across as the first logical choice when deciding where to subscribe or to listen to music. 

However, considering the recent layoffs in the company, as well as public disputes over low royalties for artists, Spotify has yet to prove its unmatched reputation to musicians and music lovers worldwide. 

A journalist by day and a podcaster by night. She's not writing to impress but to be understood.

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