Spotify’s Q1 2020 financial results tell an interesting story. While the company is still growing, the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted its advertising and changed how its users interact with the service.
The streaming giant shared that it made $1.95 billion USD (roughly $2.7 billion CAD) in revenue in Q1 2020, while its paid subscriber base finally grew to 130 million people. When you take the service’s free users into account, it rakes in an impressive 286 million users total.
What’s intriguing is that people didn’t stop listening to music and podcasts via Spotify when they got stuck at home. Instead, they just switched up how they use it, with a vast majority of people starting to use the app on game consoles.
Spotify says that while the amount of people connecting from a car, wearable or desktop has dropped, TVs and game consoles are up. Presumably, this is because people prefer to listen to music through their louder TV speakers as opposed to headphones.
The company is also seeing an increase in podcast listeners, as almost a fifth of its users are using the platforms’ relatively new feature. The icing on the cake is that 70 percent of new podcasts launched on Spotify are made using Anchor, which is an easy to use digital podcast studio. The streaming giant bought Anchor in February of 2019.
It’s not all roses, though, as the company’s advertising revenue has taken a roughly 20 percent hit as more companies struggle to stay afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Throughout all this change, Spotify has been hard at work launching new playlists and features to its service like a donation button.
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