In the fourth quarter of 2024, the music streaming service Spotify reached an all-time high with 675 million active users worldwide. This marked an increase of around 12 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 fourth quarter of 2024, the company reported 263 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

Spotify has about 80 million individual tracks on the platform.

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

According to the most recently available data, the average amount of time spent listening to Spotify by the platform’s active users was ** hours per month. The idea of spending more than an entire day per month streaming Spotify content might sound unbelievable, but internet usage is higher than ever and vastly supersedes time spent with radio, print media and even television. Streaming has become one of the most popular media activities in the world, and Spotify is the global market leader when it comes to digital music streaming. Spotify and the music marketSpotify dominates the global music streaming market and offers artists serious amounts of exposure, with some musicians garnering audiences of several million each month. The company’s user base has increased dramatically, even in the face of antitrust complaints and competition from Apple Music, as well as users expressing concern over how little Spotify pays its artists. In 2018, music streaming revenue amounted to *** billion U.S. dollars worldwide, more than six times the figure recorded for 2013. Whilst revenue growth has slowed, this is not the case when it comes to subscriber numbers, which in Spotify’s case have been increasing at a quarterly rate. Spotify reported ** million premium subscribers worldwide at the end of 2018, finishing the year with a flourish after regular growth and accumulating ** million more paid users in just twelve months. The company also commands more than ** percent of music streaming subscribers worldwide, outperforming both Apple Music and Amazon.

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.

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

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

The Spotify Music Streaming Sessions Dataset (MSSD) consists of 160 million streaming sessions with associated user interactions, audio features and metadata describing the tracks streamed during the sessions, and snapshots of the playlists listened to during the sessions.

This dataset enables research on important problems including how to model user listening and interaction behaviour in streaming, as well as Music Information Retrieval (MIR), and session-based sequential recommendations.

In the first quarter of 2025, Spotify had over ** million premium subscribers in Latin America, up from nearly ** million in the fourth quarter of 2024 – an annual increase of about ** percent. Meanwhile, the number of Spotify monthly active users (MAUs) in Latin America grew by ** percent in the first quarter of 2025 compared to the same quarter in 2024. Brazil and Mexico spend the most time streaming music Recent data shows that internet users in Mexico and Brazil devote more than * hours of their daily time to streaming music. However, while Brazil experienced a year-on-year growth of * percent in this regard, in Mexico, music streaming time declined by a fraction of a percentage point in the same period and by close to * percent since 2020. It is yet too early to say whether this trend will be a lasting one. Spotify still the top streaming choice What is certain is that music listeners in both countries rely heavily on Spotify. The company’s dominance is especially prominent in Mexico, where more than ************** of music streamers subscribe to the service. Interestingly though, Spotify has lost some ground in favor of other services such as YouTube Music, Apple Music, and Amazon Prime Music since 2021. In Brazil, Spotify is the leading streaming service, however, the market there is more varied. Here, the difference in usage between Spotify and its competitors such as YouTube Premium, Deezer and Amazon Music is not so pronounced, indicating perhaps an audience more open to less obvious players.

Spotify Million Playlist Dataset Challenge

Summary

The Spotify Million Playlist Dataset Challenge consists of a dataset and evaluation to enable research in music recommendations. It is a continuation of the RecSys Challenge 2018, which ran from January to July 2018. The dataset contains 1,000,000 playlists, including playlist titles and track titles, created by users on the Spotify platform between January 2010 and October 2017. The evaluation task is automatic playlist continuation: given a seed playlist title and/or initial set of tracks in a playlist, to predict the subsequent tracks in that playlist. This is an open-ended challenge intended to encourage research in music recommendations, and no prizes will be awarded (other than bragging rights).

Background

Playlists like Today’s Top Hits and RapCaviar have millions of loyal followers, while Discover Weekly and Daily Mix are just a couple of our personalized playlists made especially to match your unique musical tastes.

Our users love playlists too. In fact, the Digital Music Alliance, in their 2018 Annual Music Report, state that 54% of consumers say that playlists are replacing albums in their listening habits.

But our users don’t love just listening to playlists, they also love creating them. To date, over 4 billion playlists have been created and shared by Spotify users. People create playlists for all sorts of reasons: some playlists group together music categorically (e.g., by genre, artist, year, or city), by mood, theme, or occasion (e.g., romantic, sad, holiday), or for a particular purpose (e.g., focus, workout). Some playlists are even made to land a dream job, or to send a message to someone special.

The other thing we love here at Spotify is playlist research. By learning from the playlists that people create, we can learn all sorts of things about the deep relationship between people and music. Why do certain songs go together? What is the difference between “Beach Vibes” and “Forest Vibes”? And what words do people use to describe which playlists?

By learning more about nature of playlists, we may also be able to suggest other tracks that a listener would enjoy in the context of a given playlist. This can make playlist creation easier, and ultimately help people find more of the music they love.

Dataset

To enable this type of research at scale, in 2018 we sponsored the RecSys Challenge 2018, which introduced the Million Playlist Dataset (MPD) to the research community. Sampled from the over 4 billion public playlists on Spotify, this dataset of 1 million playlists consist of over 2 million unique tracks by nearly 300,000 artists, and represents the largest public dataset of music playlists in the world. The dataset includes public playlists created by US Spotify users between January 2010 and November 2017. The challenge ran from January to July 2018, and received 1,467 submissions from 410 teams. A summary of the challenge and the top scoring submissions was published in the ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology.

In September 2020, we re-released the dataset as an open-ended challenge on AIcrowd.com. The dataset can now be downloaded by registered participants from the Resources page.

Each playlist in the MPD contains a playlist title, the track list (including track IDs and metadata), and other metadata fields (last edit time, number of playlist edits, and more). All data is anonymized to protect user privacy. Playlists are sampled with some randomization, are manually filtered for playlist quality and to remove offensive content, and have some dithering and fictitious tracks added to them. As such, the dataset is not representative of the true distribution of playlists on the Spotify platform, and must not be interpreted as such in any research or analysis performed on the dataset.

Dataset Contains

1000 examples of each scenario:

Title only (no tracks) Title and first track Title and first 5 tracks First 5 tracks only Title and first 10 tracks First 10 tracks only Title and first 25 tracks Title and 25 random tracks Title and first 100 tracks Title and 100 random tracks

Download Link

Full Details: https://www.aicrowd.com/challenges/spotify-million-playlist-dataset-challenge
Download Link: https://www.aicrowd.com/challenges/spotify-million-playlist-dataset-challenge/dataset_files