Spotify's quarterly revenue 2016-2024
With music streaming not slowing down on its conquest to revolutionize the way we consume music, is the same to say about the companies that are leading the change? For Spotify, it looks like yes. The Swedish streaming giant has seen an overall increase in quarterly revenue since its foundation by CEO Daniel Ek in 2006. In the third quarter of 2024, the company accumulated a revenue of 3.99 billion euros. This number is also reflected in the ever-increasing number of subscribers, rising from 226 million premium subscribers in the Q3 of 2023 to 252 in the following year. The annual revenue also reached the highest number so far in 2023, with the company generating a whooping over 13 million euros, reflecting the streaming site’s dominance on the music streaming market.
Why is Spotify struggling with operating loss?
Despite the obvious success of the Stockholm-based streaming service, the company has reported major operating loss in the last six quarters, starting in the final quarter of 2021. While in the last quarter of 2021, this loss only amounted to seven million euros, the loss reached an astonishing 156 million euros in the first quarter of 2023 and hit a record high in the second quarter of the same year. However, in the second quarter of 2024, Spotify reported a net operating income of 266 million euros, continuing its return to profitability with quarterly operating income. Spotify has attributed past losses to large investments into its platform and acquisitions, such as smaller podcast providers. The company also choose to spend an increasing amount of money on their research and development, namely a total of 1.73 billion euros in 2023. However, while the operating loss is quite substantial, Spotify is still making a significant gross profit, in 2023 alone a total of 3.39 billion euros.
Market competitors
In recent years, Spotify has been dominating the market, expanding the distance between itself and other competitors. With a 30.5 percent share of streaming subscribers, the Swedish company is way ahead of other streaming sites such as Apple Music, with a share of 13.7 percent. Nonetheless, newer streaming services are still entering the market: the French streaming site Deezer, for example, decided to go public in the second half of 2022 and generated a gross profit of 65.1 million euros in the same year. Developments like this show that despite the streaming market being very competitive, there might still lie potential for growth in terms of user penetration but also different streaming services.
