Spotify has 155 million paid subscribers

Spotify has announced that the music streaming service now has 155 million paying users. That’s out of a total of 271 million monthly active users, the company said in announcing its quarterly results.

Spotify reports in the presentation of the quarterly figures of the fourth quarter of last year that the service now has 345 million monthly active users. That is an increase of 27 percent compared to the same period a year earlier. In the whole of 2020, 74 million new users were added, while that growth figure remained at 64 million in 2019. In the fourth quarter of 2020, 25 million monthly active users were added.

The company states that podcast usage was a major factor in the growth in the number of new users. Spotify has been betting on podcasts on its platform for some time now; At the end of October last year, it was announced that the streaming service had indexed 1.9 million podcasts. During the past quarter, that grew to 2.2 million podcasts on the platform. During the fourth quarter of 2020, 25 percent of the total monthly active users listened to one or more podcasts; that was 22 percent in the third quarter of last year.

The number of 155 million paying users represents a 24 percent increase from the same period a year earlier and a 7 percent increase from the third quarter of 2020. The number of monthly active users who do not pay a subscription fee and are therefore served advertisements , rose 30 percent year-over-year to 199 million.

Turnover amounted to 2.17 billion euros, an increase of 17 percent compared to the fourth quarter of 2019. The bottom line was a loss of 69 million euros. That was a loss of 77 million euros in the fourth quarter of 2019.