Spotify becomes first streaming platform to hit 100 million paid subscribers

Spotify have released their Q1 report today, revealing they’ve become the first streaming platform to hit 100 million paid subscribers.

Earlier this month, Spotify passed the one-year anniversary of going public as a company. In that time, there has been plenty said about the service, especially following its stock hitting an all-time low back in September.

However, with the streaming giant now releasing its Q1 report for 2019, shareholders are now able to see just how impressive Spotify have been in recent years.

In a note to shareholders, Spotify explained that its Q1 report was “largely positive with most metrics outperforming our expectations and landing at the high end of, or exceeding, our Q1 guidance.”

This follows the company launching in India back in February, expanding their global reach to that of 79 countries. As the shareholders note reports, this was a win for the company, with one million users signing up to the service in just a week, and now sitting at a total of 2 million.

However, the biggest news for the company is arguably their record-breaking announcement that they have surpassed 100 million paid subscribers, becoming the first music platform to boast those numbers.

With their Q1 results showing a 26 percent year-over-year increase in monthly active users, their paid subscribers show a year-over-year growth of 32 percent, up four percent on 2018’s Q4 results.

This news also comes just weeks after it was revealed that Apple Music surpassed Spotify in terms of paid subscribers in the US, though their overall paid subscribers lags far behind at a reported 50 million.

Source: Spotify

In recent news, Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek recently explained that he feels the platform has made it easier than ever for artists to make a living from streaming music.

“Back in 2000, 2001, at the very, very peak of the music industry, peak of CD… Our estimate is that there were about 20 to maybe 30,000 artists that could live on being recorded music artists,” Ek stated.

“Why? Well, because, again, the distribution costs so much, which ended up being that there’s very few artists that could even get distributed to begin with. And because the costs were fairly high for a person buying the music, you ended up going with what you knew and wouldn’t take that much risk on unknown artists.”

“So in the world with streaming, what’s really interesting is the alternative cost for you to listen to something new is virtually zero,” he continued. “It’s just your time.”

“And because of that, you do listen to a lot more music than you did before and you listen to a bigger diversity of artists than you did before which in turn then grows the music industry.”

Of course, this appears to be in direct contrast to the opinions of famous musicians including Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, and Misfits guitarist Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein.

This article originally appeared on The Industry Observer, which is now part of The Music Network.