JAKARTA - Good news comes from Spotify which managed to annex 205 million paid subscribers by the end of the year, making it the first streaming service to surpass the 200 million mark.
Spotify said in its financial statements for the last quarter of 2022, the company noted that currently Monthly Active Users (MAU) have reached 489 million, including customers using ad-supported packages.
In comparison, Spotify has 195 million premium-level subscribers at the end of Q3 last year and 456 million MAU. The addition of 33 million MAU is the company's largest Q4 growth. However, the good news must come along with bad news.
"We have always known that 2022 will be the year of investment and 2023 will be the year we will slow down investment and thus operational spending while revenue continues to increase," said Chief Financial Officer Paul Vogel in an interview.
Later, the company spread its wings to podcasts and audio books, where if users want to use the service, they have to subscribe. This causes Q4 losses to swell from 39 million euros to IDR 635 billion in 2021 to 270 million euros equivalent to IDR 4.3 trillion last year.
In addition, the loss was also due to higher advertising costs and hired new employees, although last week Spotify announced it would reduce its workforce by 6 percent, by about 600 people.
Spotify, unlike Apple Music, has a free level that allows anyone to listen to music with ads. However, Apple has never disclosed its monthly number of active users, almost everyone who uses Apple Music is a customer.
So the total revenue for 2022 is 3.2 billion euros equivalent to IDR 52.1 trillion, up 18 percent year-on-year (YoY) and part of 2.7 billion euros comes from premium subscriptions.
Launching CNET, Wednesday, February 1, entering the podcasting business has proven to be a wise decision because it is claimed to be one of the reasons why revenue supported by Spotify's ads rose to 449 euros for the quarter.
Going forward, Spotify hopes to get 207 million paid subscribers by the end of March and its monthly active users will increase to 500 million.
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