Last Updated: May 2023-

How many subscribers Spotify has is a growing number. The platform continues to grow with over 515 million monthly active users.

Many music industry insiders look to streaming services like Spotify as an easy path to sharing music and music publishing.

Despite Spotify revenue being limited, at least in terms of paying the artist, the platform makes the most of its revenues from subscriptions, and its subscriptions worldwide have surpassed the 515 million subscribers.

This puts Spotify ahead of its rivals including YouTube Music (80 million paid subscribers), SoundCloud (76 million paid subscribers), and Apple Music (88 million paid subscribers), keeping it as the world’s largest paid music streaming service.

Is this good news or bad? For Spotify, surely, it’s great news. Numbers in late 2015 were at 30 million subscribers. By late 2016, it was 40 million. In 2017, there was still growth up to 50 million subscribers. In recent years though, Spotify has come so far.

Spotify Facts & Figures

To better dig into the numbers and the significance of what 515 million Spotify subscribers mean, let’s dig a little deeper. Here are some Spotify facts to know based on the latest data about clicks, listens, and demographics.

  • Drake is the most streamed artist on Spotify overall, however, The Weeknd is the artist with the most monthly listens.
  • The most streamed Spotify artist of 2022 was Bad Bunny, followed distantly by Taylor Swift, Drake, The Weeknd, and BTS.
  • The most streamed song on Spotify in 2022 was Harry Styles’ “As It Was” while the most streamed album was Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti”.
  • 56% of Spotify subscribers are male and 44% are female.
  • Splitting up Spotify by age, 29% of users are between 25 and 34, and 26% are between 18 and 24. This age group forms the largest demographic of Spotify users.
  • By region, 30% of Spotify subscribers are from Europe, 21% from Latin America, 20% from North America, and the remaining 29% from the rest of the world.
  • Spotify is not just a hub of music. It also has more than 5 billion podcast titles to listen to, with a database of more than 180,000 episodes. It is the most popular podcast platform in North America among millennials.
  • As of early 2023, Spotify has more than 100 million songs on the platforms, with more than 11 million artists and creators contributing to that number.
  • There are an additional 317 million Spotify monthly users that are on an ad-supported non-paid tier.
  • Spotify paid more than $8 billion to artists in 2022, more than any other music streaming service worldwide.
  • Of the artists that receive payments through Spotify, over 1,060 artists have earned $1 million or more.

An interesting note is that, despite the massive difference in paid subscriber count between Spotify and competitors, in terms of market share, Spotify’s has actually been decreasing for quite some time.

In 2018, Spotify had 42.7% of market share of global music streaming. By 2022, that had lowered to 31%.

This is less of a sign of a loss of popularity in Spotify and more evidence that there is simply more competition sharing a finite number of subscribers.

Is Spotify The Right Service To Be Leading The Way?

If you are looking to get into the corporate side of music, Spotify is good and its numbers are very impressive

What Spotify has done has been huge in combating piracy. It’s almost motivated significant worldwide growth in total music revenues. For anyone who is a fan of Spotify, this is all helping the service continue to grow its customer base and continue to filter out deals with major record labels.

If you are an artist or a musician, however, looking to make money from music, you may want to hold off on celebrating these numbers. Spotify are still paying its artists very little by comparison with other forms of music releases.

Though the music industry overall is growing, the dollar amount that is being paid directly to the artist continues to shrink year after year and this trend has by no means stopped.

Is Spotify The End Of The Music Business?

The entire music industry has changed in regards to Spotify but if it wasn’t Spotify, it would have been another service.

Streaming is here to say and there is no disputing that it’s going to continue to be the primary influence when it comes to reaching audiences.

It is now the artist’s job to go out and use services like Spotify to build their audiences and generate interest in their work.

Through building a fan base, that can then be monetized at a later date. Simply put though, in process of building one’s audience through Spotify, the pay is little to none which once again puts developing artists at a disadvantage.

If you are lucky enough to get a team around you, this is the way to build your brand and build your audience, hence the advantages of a record label. Teaming up with an indie record label comes has many benefits, this being the most prominent one.

Spotify is not the end of the music industry but it marks another key event in the shifting of the industry from artists and musicians to an increasingly corporate and general world where corporations are making the most money.

As an artist, these tools and resources are available to build from. Though you won’t ever get rich from Spotify alone, teaming with the right record label or the right team combined with these and other services can help you gain your audience and build your brand internationally.

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