Spotify hits 140 million users, expands further into live music

Spotify now has hit 140 million global “active” users, the Swedish streaming giant has announced on its website.

The figure was 126 million in December 2016 and 100 million a year ago.

The company claims business is growing at a rate of 50% year-on-year.

In March this year, Spotify claimed that its free ad-paid Premium subscriber base is now 50 million.

The number crunching reflects the high customer uptake by the two largest streaming services. Last week Apple Music reported that it had added 7 million more subscribers since December 2016 to now total 27 million.

Brian Benedik, Spotify’s VP and Global Head of Sales, opined, “Spotify’s high-velocity audience growth cements our place as the leading media platform for music, fans and brands.

“As our global monthly active user number continues to climb, more consumers engage with us across their day and devices.

“Through this engagement, we are constantly learning about our audience through streaming intelligence – our rich, first-party data.

“We believe these differentiated insights create innovative experiences for our audience, personalised to their wants and need states. Spotify is leading the way in this new era of personalisation, and now we can do more than ever to connect brands with their target audiences.”

The largest part of Spotify’s business is the growth of ads, something which it is chasing with gusto.

It has used the furore over YouTube brand safety and transparency to offer itself as a healthy alternative.

Benedik attributes the platform’s growth in user and subscriber numbers to a number of factors.

The mainstream appeal of easy streaming is obviously one, as is the fact that music consumers are increasingly willing to pay for music (although judging by Netflix’s phenomenal take-up, they’re more likely to pay for film and TV content than music).

There has also been the highly publicised return to streaming platforms of Prince and Taylor Swift’s back catalogue.

In Spotify’s case, says Benedik, it has to keep customers interested with a combination of product and discovery.

This includes finding new playlists from its 30 million track library that will continue to grip as the customer base and listening habits become more diverse from country to country.

Spotify’s strategy is to attain this through algorithms, machine learning and more human curating.

Overnight, it announced deals with Eventbrite – which just bought Ticketfly from Pandora– as well as worldwide promoter titan AEG’s ticketing and digital media platform AXS.

These will offer customers local event recommendations (based on listening habits, user locations and favourite artists from Spotify data) and one-click access to buy AXS and Eventbrite tickets.

This is the latest in its driving business to the live music scene.

Spotify has featured 150,000 artists with concert dates in more than 100,000 venues.

Its introduction this year of the feature Spotify for Artists allows artists to get a better handle on what kind of music listen to their music, in which cities they live, how well their playlists are trending and which devices they use.

But Spotify also uses this information – as well as further figures from new partnerships with data-gathering firms as LiveRamp – to persuade major brands that advertising on Spotify is for a greater targeted audience than its rivals.

It has managed to secure multi-national brands like Samsung, Microsoft, Heineken and Procter &Gamble to advertise in terms of millions of dollars.

Despite its operating loss of 300 million and 400 million euros last year, market analysts are still bullish on Spotify’s healthy future given its rising revenue and usage.