How many paid subscribers does Spotify have? As of the first quarter of 2025, Spotify had 268 million premium subscribers worldwide, up from 239 million in the corresponding quarter of 2024. Spotify’s subscriber base has increased dramatically in the last few years and has more than doubled since early 2019. Spotify and competitors Spotify is a music streaming service originally founded in 2006 in Sweden. The platform can be used from various devices and allows users to browse through a catalogue of music licensed through multiple record labels, as well as creating and sharing playlists with other users. Additionally, listeners are able to enjoy music for free with advertisements or are also given the option to purchase a subscription to allow for unlimited ad-free music streaming. Spotify’s largest competitors are Pandora, a company that offers a similar service and remains popular in the United States, and Apple Music, which was launched in 2015. While Pandora was once among the highest-grossing music apps in the Apple App Store, recent rankings show that global services like QQ Music, NetEase Cloud Music, and YouTube Music now generate higher monthly revenues.Users are also able to register Spotify accounts using Facebook directly through the website using an app. This enables them to connect with other Facebook friends and explore their music tastes and playlists. Spotify is a popular source for keeping up-to-date with music, and the ability to enjoy Spotify anywhere at any time allows consumers to shape their music consumption around their lifestyles and preferences.

On October 22, 2024, 'APT.' by ROSÉ and Bruno Mars was the most-streamed track on Spotify with 14.6 million streams worldwide, followed by 'Die With A Smile" by Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, reaching over 11 million Spotify streams on Spotify that day. Billie Eilish's 'BIRDS OF A FEATHER' came third with just over 7.6 million streams. How do music artists get so many streams on Spotify? Firstly, Spotify is one of the most successful and popular music streaming services in the United States, and as of the first half of 2018 had the biggest share of music streaming subscribers in the world. With Spotify’s vast audience, featuring on the platform is a good start for emerging and popular artists hoping to make an impact. Secondly, there is no exact science to ‘going viral’. From the famous egg photo on Instagram posted in early 2019 to wildly successful music video ‘Gangnam Style’ released back in 2012, viral content comes in all shapes and sizes. Purposeful viral marketing is one way in which something could go viral, and is one of the reasons why some songs have so many streams in a short space of time. This type of marketing involves a tactical approach and pre-planning in an attempt to push the content into the public eye and encourage it to spread as quickly as possible. However, many artists who go viral do not expect to. Accessible, catchy content created by an already popular artist is already poised to do well, i.e. the latest song or album from U.S. singer Drake. This is an example of incidental viral marketing, when content spreads by itself partially as a result of an established and engaged audience. Indeed, Spotify’s most-streamed tracks generally originate from a well-known figure with a large following. But for smaller or entirely unknown content creators, going viral or experiencing their 15 minutes of fame can simply be a case of posting the right thing at the right time.

Bulgarian popfolk as a phenomenon

https://www.googleapis.com/download/storage/v1/b/kaggle-user-content/o/inbox%2F4937078%2F2de9bee900e6599f080c396be3659cb4%2Fthe-face.jpg?generation=1590504436110094&alt=media%20=400x800" alt="People celebrating Students Day in Bulgarian chalga club The Face in Blagoevgrad." title="People celebrating Students Day in Bulgarian chalga club The Face in Blagoevgrad.">
Bulgarian pop-folk (hereinafter referred to as chalga) is a dance genre, stemming from ethno-pop, with strong hints of Oriental rhythms and instrumentals. Chalga is one of many branches of Balkan folk throughout the peninsula (turbofolk in Serbia, manele in Romania etc.) After the fall of communism in 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe, chalga rapidly found place in everyday life.
Chalga relies on provocativity, and tracks commonly contain sexually explicit lyrics. Because of this, it causes much controversy in society and there is sparse scientific work in the field. Nevertheless, chalga becomes an increasingly popular musical style. As such, we believe it must be subject to development. Finding its 'evolution' constitutes the main scientific motivation behind this study.

Choice of data

Payner LTD is a Bulgarian record label and production studio, founded in 1990. It is currently considered the largest record label in the country, producing mainly in both Bulgarian folk and chalga genres. The company has active presence in television, taking ownership of three channels: 'Planeta TV', 'Planeta Folk' and 'Planeta HD'.
Payner LTD also maintains activity in the Internet, particularly in YouTube. Their main channel in YouTube, 'PlanetaOfficial', publishes music content exclusively. 'PlanetaOfficial' can be also credited with holding the largest audience in Bulgaria - for the time being, it has got 2.1 million subscribers and 5.0 billion total video views, dominating on the national YouTube scene.
The top three YouTube accounts in Bulgaria, associated with chalga music, as of 4 Jan 2021, are: - PlanetaOfficial (Payner LTD), 2.12m subscribers, 4962m total views, - FEN TV, 0.76m subscribers, 699m total views, - Diapason Records, 0.53m subscribers, 580m total views
In all of those circumstances, 'PlanetaOfficial' was recognised as a pivotal source of data in the study.

Method

Data were acquired from MILKER, software specifically designed for this purpose.

Data

Content

The following data in payner.csv contains Spotify information of 679 resolved tracks, out of 638 detected in PlanetaOfficial, in the period 2014-2020. Every row is a track, and contains: - the unique Spotify ID of the song; - pre-processed names of the first three artists in a song (if such are present), according to their order of mention; - name of the track; - datetime of the video upload in PlanetaOfficial; - various Spotify audio features.

Purity

There are no missing values in this data. However, [MILKER] is not flawless. It includes tracks, not associated with PlanetaOfficial - for example works by Bach and Beethoven. In this context, data purity is defined as the fraction of songs with corresponding video uploads by PlanetaOfficial.

After random sampling (n=100), it may be inferred that the purity of this dataset is (0.91, 0.99), 95% C.I.

The most successful music streaming service in the United States was Apple Music as of September, with the most up to date information showing that 49.5 million users accessed the platform each month. Spotify closely followed, with a similarly impressive 47.7 million monthly users.

What is a music streaming service?

Music streaming services provide their users with a database compiled of songs, playlists, albums and videos, where content can be accessed online, downloaded, shared, bookmarked and organized.

The music streaming business is huge, and has sometimes been lauded as the savior of the music industry. The biggest two services are in constant competition for the monopoly of the market. Apple Music was launched in 2015, whereas Spotify has been around since 2008. Other popular streaming services include Deezer, SoundCloud and iHeartRadio.

Do artists make a lot of money from streaming services? 

In short, unfortunately not. Both Apple Music and Spotify have been frequently criticized for the tiny royalty payments they offer artists. Particularly for emerging talent, streaming services are far from a lucrative source of income. Bigger, established stars like Taylor Swift are more likely to regularly make a good amount of money this way. But either way, a track needs to go viral or be streamed several million times before it earns any real cash.