The world's most popular music streaming platform, Spotify, continued its impressive growth at the end of last year - it ended the last quarter with 155 million paying subscribers. This represents a year-on-year increase of 24%.
Unlike competing platforms Apple and Tidal offers Spotify a free subscription plan (with ads), which is especially popular in developing markets. The service now boasts 199 million users, up 30% year over year. Europe and North America continue to be the most valuable markets for the platform, with the former benefiting from recent expansion into Russia and neighboring markets.
The Premium Family and Premium Duo subscription plans also continue to be popular, and the platform's bet on podcasts appears to be paying off, with 2,2 million podcasts currently available and hours spent listening to them almost doubling.
As is often the case with relatively new companies like Spotify, there is a price for high growth. In the last quarter of last year, the service recorded a loss of 125 million euros (roughly 3,2 million crowns), although this is an improvement year-on-year - in the 4th quarter of 2019, the loss amounted to 209 million euros (approximately 5,4 million CZK) .
Sales, on the other hand, reached 2,17 billion euros (about 56,2 billion crowns), which is roughly 14% more year-on-year. In its financial report, the company states that in the long term, subscriber growth will continue to be a priority for it over profits.
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