In 2024, music streaming service Spotify generated a revenue of 15.67 billion euros, reaching company’s first-ever full year of profitability. The majority of Spotify's revenues came from its premium subscribers rather than ad placements. Founded in Stockholm in 2005, the former start-up is now a market leader in the digital music streaming sector, competing alongside established companies such as Apple and their streaming service Apple Music. Spotify’s record operating income in 2024 While Spotify has established itself as a market leader, generating high revenue, it has also seen a significant turnaround in operating income. The company moved from a loss of 446 million euros in 2023 to a record operating profit of 1.37 billion euros in 2024. This milestone was driven by growth in revenue, cost optimizations, and a surge in premium subscriptions. The net income of Spotify seems to confirm this, as Spotify recorded a net profit of 1.14 billion euros in 2024, compared to a net loss of 532 million euros in 2023 and 430 million euros in 2022. The music streaming market is expanding While Spotify has struggled with generating an operating income, the music streaming market is actually expanding. The number of subscribers to music streaming services has steadily been rising, highlighting the increased popularity of digital music consumption. While this development goes hand in hand with a decrease in physical music sales, the more recent upsurge in audio content streaming can partly also be attributed to the heightened demand in entertainment caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

In 2024, Spotify reported its first-ever annual net profit of 1.14 billion euros, after a net loss of 532 million euros in 2023 and 430 million euros in 2022. This turnaround reflects strong revenue growth, cost optimizations, and a surge in premium subscribers. Since its launch, the company has struggled with profitability, experiencing its largest net loss of 581 million euros in 2020. However, with increasing revenues and strategic adjustments, Spotify has solidified its position as a leader in the music streaming industry. Further information Spotify is one of the leading online streaming services worldwide, experiencing rapid growth over the years. With a compound annual growth rate of 61 percent over 14 years, the platform reached 265 million paying subscribers by the end of 2024. The music streaming service also hit an all-time high of 640 million active users globally, marking a 12 percent increase in just one year. Spotify has proved popular across various markets, cementing its position as the dominant player in the digital music industry. Spotify has proved popular in multiple markets across the world, namely the United States, where more than 25 percent of 18 to 34-year-olds reported using the service. Spotify’s appeal does not only lie in its music streaming and online radio capabilities but the platform’s strong social components such as users being able to add and message friends, as well as being able to create and share music playlists as well as recommend tracks to connected users. Spotify also allows users to login with their Facebook accounts and to cross-post their listening habits to the social network In 2015, the company’s revenue surpassed 1 billion euros for the first time but not without a cost – that year, Spotify’s net loss amounted to 162 million euros. A major part of Spotify’s expenses are the royalty fees that the streaming platform has to pay to the music artists and license holders, with payments amounting to over 882 million U.S. dollars in 2014. As the music streaming industry continues to expand, digital streaming revenue in the United States reached 14.36 billion U.S. dollars in 2023, accounting for the majority of the music industry’s total revenue.

Spotify's global revenue in the fourth quarter of 2024 was primarily derived from its premium segment, which generated 3.71 billion euros during that period. Meanwhile, following a decline in ad-supported revenue in 2020 due to the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the segment began to recover and reached an all-time high of 537 million euros in the fourth quarter of 2024.

Here is the full breakdown of how much revenue Spotify has generated each year since 2012.

In this blog are the latest Spotify statistics that paint a picture of how the company has succeeded so far and what’s likely to happen in the future.

In 2021, Spotify's podcast advertising revenue in the United States increased by 108.5 percent, from 52.2 to 108.9 million U.S. dollars. This followed a 120 percent increase in 2020, from 23.7 to 52.2 million dollars. Growth was projected to slide into double-digit territory in 2022, with an expected increase of 76.2 percent.

In the most recent reported fiscal year, Spotify generated approximately 13.82 billion euros in premium revenue and 1.85 billion euros in ad-supported revenue. Both figures were the highest reported to date, with premium revenue having grown by more than ten billion euros since 2017. Contributing to Spotify’s success was its strong global subscriber base – as of the third quarter of 2024, the music streaming platform had 252 million premium subscribers worldwide. Spotify has gained significant popularity across multiple markets, particularly in the United States, where over 26 percent of 18 to 34-year-olds reported using the service in 2018. Spotify’s competition Spotify’s closest competitor is Apple Music. That said, Apple’s worldwide subscribers are almost half that of Spotify’s, despite both services being popular for different reasons. Theoretically, Pandora Radio could have presented Spotify with a fair amount of competition, but this was not to be. Pandora’s radio station format failed to match Spotify’s playlist set-up in terms of popularity, and Pandora struggled to convert its users into paid subscribers, something which Spotify has always been good at. Pandora Radio received heavy investment from Sirius XM in 2017 and was officially acquired by the company in early 2019, so it will be interesting to see what happens in the future as Sirius gets to work on Pandora’s audience and attempts to generate cash from its arguably wide (but unpaid) user base. For now though, it seems that Spotify’s position remains safe.

Despite not being very profitable, Spotify has maintained strong subscriber and revenue growth. Here are the key Spotify Statistics you need to know.

Paying subscribers account for about half of Spotify’s monthly active users. This is the number of paying subscribers by year that Spotify has had since 2015.

In 2023, music streaming service Spotify generated a revenue of over 13.2 billion euros, up from 11 billion in the previous year. The majority of Spotify's revenues came from its premium subscribers rather than ad placements. Founded in Stockholm in 2005, the former start-up is now a market leader in the digital music streaming sector, competing alongside established companies such as Apple and their streaming service Apple Music. Spotify is operating on a loss While Spotify has become a market leader thus generating a high revenue, it has also experienced a significant jump in operating loss, from 73 million euro in 2019 to 293 million euros loss in 2020. According to Spotify this is due to high costs in areas such as content creation, marketing, and sales as well as securing rights of audio and video content. This operating loss is likely to have a significant impact on the profitability of the global streaming service. The net income of Spotify seems to confirm this, since the company has been operating on a loss since its inception, claiming its highest net loss at 581 million euros in 2020. The music streaming market is expanding While Spotify has struggled with generating an operating income, the music streaming market is actually expanding. The number of subscribers to music streaming services has steadily been rising, highlighting the increased popularity of digital music consumption. While this development goes hand in hand with a decrease in physical music sales, the more recent upsurge in audio content streaming can partly also be attributed to the heightened demand in entertainment caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

North American Spotify users spend the most time on the platform steaming an average of 140 minutes of content on the Spotify app daily.

Spotify generated an estimated 1.5 billion U.S. dollars in advertising revenue in 2022. Based on the latest calculations, this figure will reach 2.2 billion U.S. dollars by 2027.

Why advertise on Spotify?

One of the main reasons for Spotify's appeal as an advertising destination is its reach. Company reports indicated that the number of Spotify's monthly active users (MAUs) hit a record high of 433 million in 2022, nearly twice the audience size recorded in 2019. By comparison, Apple Music has yet to reach the 100-million-subscriber mark, highlighting Spotify's pole position among the world's most popular paid music streaming services. Another factor distinguishing the Swedish streaming giant from international competitors is its two-tier subscription model. In addition to its Premium model, Spotify offers a free, ad-supported option that serves audio and video ads between songs.

Spotlight on podcast advertising

Podcasts have become essential contributors to the success of digital audio streaming platforms like Spotify. Data showed that Spotify amassed over 32 million monthly podcast listeners in the United States in 2022 and outperformed Apple Podcasts by some four million listeners. Not only that, but Spotify's podcast advertising revenue has also skyrocketed in recent years, jumping from just over 25 million in 2020 to almost 192 million in 2022. Industry sources expect this figure to surpass 400 million by the year 2024, highlighting the ever-increasing contribution of podcast content to Spotify's financial future.

MGD: Music Genre Dataset

Over recent years, the world has seen a dramatic change in the way people consume music, moving from physical records to streaming services. Since 2017, such services have become the main source of revenue within the global recorded music market. Therefore, this dataset is built by using data from Spotify. It provides a weekly chart of the 200 most streamed songs for each country and territory it is present, as well as an aggregated global chart.

Considering that countries behave differently when it comes to musical tastes, we use chart data from global and regional markets from January 2017 to December 2019, considering eight of the top 10 music markets according to IFPI: United States (1st), Japan (2nd), United Kingdom (3rd), Germany (4th), France (5th), Canada (8th), Australia (9th), and Brazil (10th).

We also provide information about the hit songs and artists present in the charts, such as all collaborating artists within a song (since the charts only provide the main ones) and their respective genres, which is the core of this work. MGD also provides data about musical collaboration, as we build collaboration networks based on artist partnerships in hit songs. Therefore, this dataset contains:

Genre Networks: Success-based genre collaboration networks

Genre Mapping: Genre mapping from Spotify genres to super-genres

Artist Networks: Success-based artist collaboration networks

Artists: Some artist data

Hit Songs: Hit Song data and features

Charts: Enhanced data from Spotify Weekly Top 200 Charts

This dataset was originally built for a conference paper at ISMIR 2020. If you make use of the dataset, please also cite the following paper:

Gabriel P. Oliveira, Mariana O. Silva, Danilo B. Seufitelli, Anisio Lacerda, and Mirella M. Moro. Detecting Collaboration Profiles in Success-based Music Genre Networks. In Proceedings of the 21st International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2020), 2020.

@inproceedings{ismir/OliveiraSSLM20, title = {Detecting Collaboration Profiles in Success-based Music Genre Networks}, author = {Gabriel P. Oliveira and Mariana O. Silva and Danilo B. Seufitelli and Anisio Lacerda and Mirella M. Moro}, booktitle = {21st International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference} pages = {726--732}, year = {2020} }

The latest Spotify statistics from the company’s annual report show that 69% of Spotify premium subscribers are located in Europe and North America.

34% of Spotify’s monthly active users live in Europe. That means that Spotify has 147.22 million users in the EU regions alone.

Spotify reported its first-ever annual net profit in 2024, marking a significant financial turnaround. The company recorded an operating profit of 1.37 billion euros, compared to a loss of 446 million euros in the previous year. This milestone was driven by revenue growth, cost optimizations, and a surge in premium subscriptions. Additionally, Spotify's annual revenue reached 15.67 billion euros, up 18.3 percent year-on-year, further solidifying its market position.

Spotify has about 11 million artists and creators on the platform.

In 2024, Taylor Swift was the artist with the most streamed album on Spotify. Her album "THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT" was streamed over 6.6 billion times in 2024. She also entered the top 10 with her album "Lover" in sixth position, having registered nearly 3.3 billion streams on Spotify.

As of February 2024, Spotify has 574 million active users.

In 2024, Taylor Swift was the most streamed artist on Spotify. Her songs were streamed over 28 billion times within the year. The second most streamed artist was The Weeknd with more than 13 billion streams in 2023.