Spotify reaches 188 million subscribers despite its “podcast crisis”

Despite the difficult period for Spotify’s podcasting industry, the platform continues to increase its number of subscribers, which has now risen to 188 million. The data refer to the second quarter of 2022, and show us that the average of monthly active users (MAU) stands at 433 million. The two values ​​represent a year-over-year increase of 14% and 19% respectively. In particular, the MAU figure represents the largest growth ever recorded by the company.

The Spotify Podcast Crisis

Surely surprising is the fact that this is not a positive period for podcasts, content on which Spotify has decided to focus in recent years. In fact, one of the most followed shows, Reply All, aired its final episode on June 23rd. Meanwhile another popular podcast, The Obamas, has become esclusiva Audibleeffectively passing to the competition.

Despite these “small hitches”, Spotify is confirmed as the leader in the podcast sector, thanks to programs such as The Joe Rogan Experience (with all due respect to Neil Young). Meanwhile, the company is already thinking about the future, focusing on new formats, having recently purchased Findaway, an audiobook platform.

Spotify: subscribers are growing but revenues are falling

All that sounds is not gold though: in the last quarter Spotify recorded a loss of approximately 125 million eurosdespite the growing number of subscribers. Average revenue per user now stands at around € 4.54, up from € 4.38 last quarter.

Even this quarter did not dispel the mystery of Spotify HiFi, a new level of subscription that will allow the reproduction of content in higher quality. The service, announced in February 2021, is intended primarily for listening to music, offering a lossless audio playback mode (as is already the case for Apple Music and Amazon Music).

Summing up, we can say that Spotify, at least at the moment, maintains its status as an industry-leading platformat least as regards the number of subscribers.