Spotify: Up to 5% of Free Version Users Bypass Ads

Spotify estimates that less than 5 percent of users of the free version use methods to avoid ads. This is evident from the company’s quarterly figures. Spotify now has 180 million members, of which 83 million are paid subscribers.

According to Spotify’s estimate, this would mean that there would be up to 9 million people who bypass advertisements with the music streaming service. Spotify is commenting on the number of people doing this because it has retroactively adjusted active user numbers. When presenting its quarterly results for the first quarter, Spotify said it had a total of 170 million users. Now the streaming service says it had 173 million users at the time. Previously, 3 million people were not counted because they may have been avoiding advertisements. From now on, Spotify will also include those users in its figures, because those people do provide costs and because other internet companies do the same.

The estimate of up to 5 percent is higher than the number of people who previously did not include Spotify in its figures. The company does not further explain what the estimate is based on. However, Spotify has previously indicated that two million users were detected who circumvent advertisements last year.

Furthermore, Spotify says it will remove users who are considered “fake”. This concerns, for example, users and bots that only play music to influence statistics or royalties. Spotify says it cannot exclude all fake users because it is unable to detect them all. The streaming service does not mention how large the percentage of such fake accounts is.

Spotify reports in its quarterly results that it now has 180 million monthly active users. Of these, 83 million are with a subscription. In the previous quarter, there were 75 million paid subscribers. Revenue for the quarter was $1.27 billion, 26 percent more than in the same quarter last year. Spotify is still not making a profit: the loss came to $ 90 million.