Spotify has 320 million users but failed to turn a profit this quarter

Spotify’s latest earnings report is out now and the company is still growing its user base, but surprisingly came out of the quarter at with a loss.

The company did grow its revenue by 14 percent, to €1.98 million (roughly 3 billion CAD), but it still finished the quarter with an operating loss of €101 million (roughly, $157 million CAD).

While that seems bad, Spotify’s earnings report mentions that it was planning for this as part of its content and subscriber growth. This is in part to launching in Russia and a few other countries in that northern region of the world, plus offering tons of plan discounts to lure in new subscribers, according to The Verge. 

This seems to have worked as the company nets 320 million daily active users, and 144 million of them are paid subscribers. This is huge since Apple Music only has a reported 60 million paid subscribers, and Amazon Music sits around 55 million. It should be noted that Apple Music doesn’t offer a free tier like Spotify. Amazon Music has a free tier, but in its latest report, most of its subscribers are paid users.

On top of that, the company reports that it now has 1.9 million podcasts on its service, which is up from 1.5 million that the company reported in the previous quarter.

Source: Spotify, The Verge