In the first quarter of 2025, the music streaming service Spotify reached an all-time high with 678 million active users worldwide. This marked an increase of around ten percent in just one year. What is Spotify? Spotify is a music streaming service that offers digital audio content. Basic audio content can be accessed for free whereas premium user subscriptions enable users to access offline mobile content as well as listen to music without advertising. In the first quarter of 2025, the company reported 268 million paying subscribers. Launched in 2008, Spotify originated in Sweden before expanding to European markets and the United States in 2011. Spotify’s U.S. launch was strongly marketed through Facebook, with the music streaming app profiting from the social listening integration via social media. Part of Spotify’s appeal can be attributed to the user- and brand-curated playlists, which can be shared publicly or between friends. Fans may choose what to listen to based on their current mood or preference, and the ability to share such content provides an element of social connectivity ordinarily reserved for networking sites.

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.

As of January 2025, Spotify has over 640 million monthly active users. Here is the full breakdown of Spotify users by year since 2015:

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

As of March 2018, Spotify’s user base was dominated by Millennials, with ** percent of its users aged 25 to 34 and ** percent aged between 18 and 24 years old. The streaming giant has permanently altered how consumers discover, engage with and share music, and according to a 2018 survey, Spotify reaches almost **** of 16 to 24 year olds in the United States each week. The power of SpotifySpotify’s popularity is undeniable, accumulating millions of premium subscribers worldwide each quarter and hundreds of millions of unique visitors to Spotify.com every month. In the United States, Spotify is one of the most commonly used apps for listening to podcasts, and despite being in constant competition with Apple Music, remains a large part of U.S. music listeners’ lives. A survey revealed that Spotify is also the preferred music streaming service among 18 to 29-year-olds, which may seem unremarkable given the data on Spotify’s user base, but serves as further evidence of Spotify’s popularity among younger users. Whether Spotify’s growth will last forever, only time will tell, particularly as Apple Music continues to put up a good fight and smaller but increasingly popular services such as Deezer begin to make their mark. But with the company recording a profit in early 2019 for the first time since its inception, Spotify remains very much a market leader and firmly on the path to future success.

34% of Spotify’s monthly active users live in Europe. That means that Spotify has 147.22 million users in the EU regions alone. Here’s the breakdown of regions that contribute the most users to Spotify:

29% of all Spotify users fall into the 25 to 34 age range. This is closely followed by 26% of users in the 18 to 24-year-old age.

In the first quarter of 2025, Spotify had *** million monthly active users, which was a little less than the record high of *** million in the fourth quarter of 2024. Meanwhile, this figure represents an increase from *** million users in the previous quarter, highlighting Spotify's ability to attract and retain users through it's free, ad-supported tier. The company's strategy of offering a free option alongside its premium subscription service appears to be paying dividends in terms of user acquisition. User base growth and market penetration Spotify's total active user base hit an all-time high with *** million active users in Q1 2025, marking a surge of ** million users in just one year. This growth encompasses both ad-supported and premium subscribers, with the latter reaching *** million in the same quarter. The platform's expansion is particularly strong in Europe and North America, which together account for ** percent of Spotify's premium subscribers. Europe remains Spotify's strongest market, representing ** percent of paying users. Revenue challenges and competitive landscape Despite the robust user growth, Spotify faces challenges in monetizing its expanding ad-supported user base. The company's premium average revenue per user (ARPU) has been declining since 2017, reaching **** euros in first quarter of 2025. This trend suggests that while Spotify excels at attracting users, converting them to higher-paying tiers remains a challenge. The company operates in a competitive landscape that includes rivals like Pandora and Apple Music, forcing Spotify to continually innovate and improve its offerings to maintain its market position.

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.

As of the first quarter of 2025, Europe accounted for ** percent of Spotify monthly active users. The popular Swedish streaming service had a strong user base in Latin America, accounting for ** percent of Spotify's total *** million MAUs at that time.
Spotify Since its launch in 2008, Spotify has grown into the most widely used music streaming platform in the world, controlling over a ***** of the industry’s global market share. Despite being in direct competition with some of the biggest names in the tech industry, the company has managed to accumulate over *********** million paying subscribers and millions more free and ad-supported users. Spotify has ensured that this massive userbase has led to increasing financial success. The company reported an annual revenue of around *** billion euros in 2018, outpacing its 2017 figure by well over a ******* dollars. Music streaming Music has always been an important form of human expression and entertainment, but never before has it been so easily accessible. Thanks to the growing popularity of smartphones and streaming services, hundreds of millions of people around the world have access to an almost unlimited library of music at the touch of a button. As of 2024, streaming accounted for ** percent of the total music industry revenue in the United States, up from ** percent six years earlier. This highlights the massive influence of companies like Spotify on the music industry as a whole.

A dataset covering Spotify usage and artist performance in 2025, including metrics like monthly active users, premium subscriber counts, demographic breakdowns, and playlist analytics.

This dataset is based on the subset of users in the #nowplaying dataset who publish their #nowplaying tweets via Spotify. In principle, the dataset holds users, their playlists and the tracks contained in these playlists.

The csv-file holding the dataset contains the following columns: "user_id", "artistname", "trackname", "playlistname", where

user_id is a hash of the user's Spotify user name

artistname is the name of the artist

trackname is the title of the track and

playlistname is the name of the playlist that contains this track.

The separator used is , each entry is enclosed by double quotes and the escape character used is .

A description of the generation of the dataset and the dataset itself can be found in the following paper:

Pichl, Martin; Zangerle, Eva; Specht, Günther: "Towards a Context-Aware Music Recommendation Approach: What is Hidden in the Playlist Name?" in 15th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDM 2015), pp. 1360-1365, IEEE, Atlantic City, 2015.

Spotify has about 80 million individual tracks on the platform.

By 2025, Spotify will have ***** million users, over ****** million more than the **** million recorded in 2020. However, a gradual decline in Pandora's user base is anticipated to continue over the coming years, with the company losing *** to ***** million active listeners per year. Spotify and Pandora – more information Pandora In 2018, Pandora was most popular among users aged ** to ** and users aged 55 or above, whereas adults in the ** to 24-year-old age bracket was by far the company's weakest market segment. Pandora's user base may be flatlining compared to Spotify's, but Pandora’s revenue jumped from **** million U.S. dollars to almost *** billion in a decade, showing incredible and consistent growth during that time. Pandora generates most of its revenue from advertising, although has grown increasingly reliant on revenue from subscription services. Pandora was acquired by Sirius XM in February 2019 for *** billion U.S. dollars. Spotify In 2018, Spotify reported *** billion euros in revenue, following a history of significant growth. Spotify was operating at a loss for years, but reported its first quarterly operating profit at the beginning of 2019. the company has placed a stronger focus on podcasts and will continue to do so according to industry experts and company reports, and is one of the most popular podcast providers in the United States.

These are the top 20 most followed playlists on Spotify right now.

This dataset provides insights into user music listening behavior on the Spotify platform. It captures key information about individual music streaming sessions, including:

Track Information:

• spotify_track_uri: A unique identifier for each track on Spotify.
• track_name: The name of the track.
• artist_name: The name of the artist who performed the track.
• album_name: The name of the album the track belongs to.

Playback Details:

• ts: Timestamp indicating when the playback of the track ended.
• platform: The device or platform used to stream the track (e.g., mobile, desktop, web player).
• ms_played: The duration of the track played in milliseconds.

Playback Behavior:

• reason_start: The reason why the track started playing (e.g., user selection, autoplay, recommendation).
• reason_end: The reason why the track stopped playing (e.g., natural end, user skip, interruption).
• shuffle: Indicates whether shuffle mode was active during playback (TRUE or FALSE).
• skipped: Indicates whether the user manually skipped to the next track (TRUE or FALSE).

Potential Uses

This dataset can be valuable for various analyses

• Understanding user listening habits: Identifying popular tracks, artists, and albums; analyzing listening patterns across different platforms and times of day; understanding the impact of shuffle mode on listening behavior.
• Improving music recommendations: Analyzing user skips and playback durations to refine recommendation algorithms.
• Evaluating platform performance: Identifying and addressing issues related to playback quality and interruptions.
• Developing personalized music experiences: Tailoring features and recommendations based on individual listening preferences.

This statistic presents data on the share of iOS users who listen to Spotify Premium in the United States in the first half of 2016 and the first half of 2017. According to the source, ** percent of iOS users listened to Spotify Premium on mobile in the first half of 2017, up from ** percent a year earlier.

💁‍♀️Please take a moment to carefully read through this description and metadata to better understand the dataset and its nuances before proceeding to the Suggestions and Discussions section.

Dataset Description:

This dataset compiles the tracks from Spotify's official "Top Tracks of 2023" playlist, showcasing the most popular and influential music of the year according to Spotify's streaming data. It represents a wide range array of genres, artists, and musical styles that have defined the musical landscapes of 2023. Each track in the dataset is detailed with a variety of features, popularity, and metadata. This dataset serves as an excellent resource for music enthusiasts, data analysts, and researchers aiming to explore music trends or develop music recommendation systems based on empirical data.

Data Collection and Processing:

Obtaining the Data:

The data was obtained directly from the Spotify Web API, specifically from the "Top Tracks of 2023" official playlist curated by Spotify. The Spotify API provides detailed information about tracks, artists, and albums through various endpoints.

Data Processing:

To process and structure the data, I developed Python scripts using data science libraries such as pandas for data manipulation and spotipy for API interactions specifically for Spotify data retrieval.

Workflow:

1. Authentification
2. API Requests
3. Data Cleaning and Transformation
4. Saving the Data

Attribute Descriptions:

• artist_name: the artist name
• track_name: the title of the track
• is_explicit: Indicates whether the track contains explicit content
• album_release_date: The date when the track was released
• genres: A list of genres associated with the track's artist(s)
• danceability: A measure from 0.0 to 1.0 indicating how suitable a track is for dancing based on a combination of musical elements
• valence: A measure from 0.0 to 1.0 indicating the musical positiveness conveyed by a track
• energy: A measure from 0.0 to 1.0 representing a perceptual measure of intensity and activity
• loudness: The overall loudness of a track in decibels (dB)
• acousticness: A measure from 0.0 to 1.0 whether the track is acoustic.
• instrumentalness: Predicts whether a track contains no vocals
• liveness: Detects the presence of an audience in the recordings
• speechiness: Detects the presence of spoken words in a track
• key: The key the track is in. Integers map to pitches using standard Pitch Class notation.
• tempo: The overall estimated tempo of a track in beats per minute (BPM)
• mode: Modality of the track
• duration_ms: The length of the track in milliseconds
• time_signature: An estimated overall time signature of a track
• popularity: A score between 0 and 100, with 100 being the most popular

Possible Data Projects

• Trends Analysis
• Genre Popularity
• Mood and Music
• Comparison with other tracks

Disclaimer and Responsible Use:

• This dataset, derived from Spotify's "Top Tracks of 2023" playlist, is intended for educational, research, and analysis purposes only. Users are urged to use this data responsibly and ethically.
• Users should comply with Spotify's Terms of Service and Developer Policies when using this dataset.
• The dataset includes music track information such as names and artist details, which are subject to copyright. While the dataset presents this information for analytical purposes, it does not convey any rights to the music itself.
• Users of the dataset must ensure that their use does not infringe on the rights of copyright holders. Any analysis, distribution, or derivative work should respect the intellectual property rights of all parties and comply with applicable laws.
• The dataset is provided "as is," without warranty, and the creator disclaims any legal liability for the use of the dataset by others. Users are responsible for ensuring their use of the dataset is legal and ethical.
• For the most accurate and up-to-date information regarding Spotify's music, playlists, and policies, users are encouraged to refer directly to Spotify's official website. This ensures that users have access to the latest details directly from the source.
• The creator/maintainer of this dataset is not affiliated with Spotify, any third-party entities, or artists mentioned within the dataset. This project is independent and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Spotify or any other mentioned entities.

Contribution

I encourage users who discover new insights, propose dataset enhancements, or craft analytics that illuminate aspects of the dataset's focus to share their findings with the community. - Kaggle Notebooks: To facilitate sharing and collaboration, users are encouraged to create and share their analyses through Kaggle notebooks. For ease of use, start your notebook by clicking "New Notebook" atop this dataset’s page on K...

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.

This dataset was created using Spotify developer API. It consists of user-created as well as Spotify-curated playlists. The dataset consists of 1 million playlists, 3 million unique tracks, 3 million unique albums, and 1.3 million artists. The data is stored in a SQL database, with the primary entities being songs, albums, artists, and playlists. Each of the aforementioned entities are represented by unique IDs (Spotify URI). Data is stored into following tables:

album

artist

track

playlist

track_artist1

track_playlist1

album

| id | name | uri |

id: Album ID as provided by Spotify name: Album Name as provided by Spotify uri: Album URI as provided by Spotify

artist

| id | name | uri |

id: Artist ID as provided by Spotify name: Artist Name as provided by Spotify uri: Artist URI as provided by Spotify

track

| id | name | duration | popularity | explicit | preview_url | uri | album_id |

id: Track ID as provided by Spotify name: Track Name as provided by Spotify duration: Track Duration (in milliseconds) as provided by Spotify popularity: Track Popularity as provided by Spotify explicit: Whether the track has explicit lyrics or not. (true or false) preview_url: A link to a 30 second preview (MP3 format) of the track. Can be null uri: Track Uri as provided by Spotify album_id: Album Id to which the track belongs

playlist

| id | name | followers | uri | total_tracks |

id: Playlist ID as provided by Spotify name: Playlist Name as provided by Spotify followers: Playlist Followers as provided by Spotify uri: Playlist Uri as provided by Spotify total_tracks: Total number of tracks in the playlist.

track_artist1

| track_id | artist_id |

Track-Artist association table

track_playlist1

| track_id | playlist_id |

Track-Playlist association table

• - - - - SETUP - - - - -

The data is in the form of a SQL dump. The download size is about 10 GB, and the database populated from it comes out to about 35GB.

spotifydbdumpschemashare.sql contains the schema for the database (for reference): spotifydbdumpshare.sql is the actual data dump.

Setup steps: 1. Create database 2. mysql -u -p < spotifydbdumpshare.sql

• - - - - PAPER - - - - -

The description of this dataset can be found in the following paper:

Papreja P., Venkateswara H., Panchanathan S. (2020) Representation, Exploration and Recommendation of Playlists. In: Cellier P., Driessens K. (eds) Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases. ECML PKDD 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1168. Springer, Cham