Spotify today reported its third quarter earnings for 2018, announcing that paid subscribers for its streaming music service have grown to 87 million and total monthly active users (including the free tier) now reach 191 million. This is an increase from 83 million paid subscribers and 180 million total users that Spotify had in July 2018.
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In terms of year-over-year growth, paid subscriber numbers have grown 40 percent in comparison to 2017 and MAUs have grown 28 percent. Spotify touted its various multi-partner bundles as a big help to signing up new subscribers, which are also retaining users for longer and driving churn lower. The latest bundle includes Spotify, Hulu, and Showtime for $4.99/month for students.
Spotify is in an ongoing race with Apple Music to add more subscribers, and as of now Spotify is still winning in terms of paid subscribers. It's been a while since we've heard news of updated Apple Music subscriber numbers, with the last count in April 2018 putting Apple's service at 40 million paid subscribers. Apple Music does not have a free tier like Spotify, but counting users on the three-month free trial along with paid users, Apple's service hit over 50 million subscribers in May 2018.
These numbers refer to global paid subscriber users, and in a report over the summer it was suggested that Apple Music is actually ahead of Spotify's paid subscriber count in the United States. Both Apple Music and Spotify were said to have more than 20 million paid subscribers in the U.S. as of July 2018, and at the time Apple was "a hair ahead" of its rival.
Looking into the fourth quarter of 2018, Spotify expects paid subscribers to reach 93-96 million users, while monthly active users are predicted to break the 200 million user milestone and sit somewhere between 199-206 million users globally.
Top Rated Comments
(View all)I’m loving Spotify more than Apple Music. Discovering more songs and because of a promo where I live, I got it free for a year.
So much this. Spotify is simply the better app and service, in almost every measureable metric. User interface, song discovery algorithms, features and controls, etc etc.Apple Music layout is also an eye sore.
(was an Apple Music user for 2yrs)
Anyone who says Apple Music is better is simply flat-out wrong, IMO.
It's too bad. I'd love to have streaming TuneIn and Amazon Music on my watch.
Oh well.
How many of you streamers had a music collection to begin with that you abandoned in favour of streaming?
Apple Music is the best of all worlds to me. I've purchased about half of the songs in my collection, the other half got added through Apple Music for a total of about 30k songs. I don't see myself ever abandoning the (overwhelmingly lossless) tracks that I own. Nor have I stopped purchasing CDs and lossless downloads on Bandcamp etc. whenever I've discovered music of lasting value on Apple Music.I love the idea of streaming but it feels wasteful to abandon my collection.. I feel like I might just be better to keep buying cds/iTunes as
The only bummer for me is that sonos doesn’t stream purchased music from my phone as well as it does with streaming services