Q1 2018: Spotify now has 170 million monthly active users

Spotify is now a public company, and will now release financial results every quarter. For number lovers, rejoice, but for those who’d like a music analogy instead, they made it rain.

Okay, not really.

On Wednesday the Swedish streaming music company published its first set of results. And the numbers weren’t a stellar as investors had hoped.

For one, the company announced that it ended the quarter with 170-million monthly active users. Although that number’s up by 30% year-over-year, the company has quite a bridge to cross to reach its forecast 208-million subscribers by the end of 2018.

Premium subscribers were up by 4-million this quarter to 75-million. That’s an increase of 45% over Q1 2017.

Operating loss also came in at 4% of its total revenue, which was some €1.13-billion. It notes that exchange rates affected its profits negatively this quarter.

As for the subscriber balance, there’s an upside.

North America and Europe dominate Spotify’s monthly active user numbers, with a further 21% stemming from Latin America. But it’s the untapped markets of Asia, the Middle East and Africa that looks promising: the home of just 11% of Spotify’s users.

More acutely, just 9% of subscribers are from the “Rest of the World”. Europe remains its biggest market.

Feature image: Spotify