Spotify is the first music streaming service to break the 200 million subscriber mark

At the end of last quarter, the Swedish company had 205 million paying users. This added 20 million subscription customers within three months. In total, the number of users in the paid and free version rose from 456 million at the end of September to 489 million, Spotify announced on Tuesday.

For the current quarter, Spotify expects a slower influx of users: the number of subscription customers is expected to increase by about two million and the total number of users will reach the 500 million mark.

In the past quarter, sales grew by 18 percent on an annual basis to approximately 3.17 billion euros. Advertising revenue rose by 14 percent to 449 million euros. In recent years, Spotify has invested heavily in, among other things, the podcast business to build another mainstay in addition to subscription income. The bottom line is that Spotify posted a loss of 270 million euros after being in the red of 39 million euros a year earlier. These losses have been accepted for years to grow as quickly as possible.

Spotify announced last week that it would cut 6 percent of its jobs. As of December 31, the service had 10,151 employees, so the cuts are likely to affect about 600 of them. Founder and boss Daniel Ek pointed out that the service had grown too fast for his company during the pandemic.

(sda/awp/dpa)