Popular music streaming service Spotify has made its Q2 2022 report public and there is some interesting news.
Spotify Q2 2022 Highlights
Here is some of the good news coming from Spotify.
- Active users are up 19% from the same period in 2021 for a total of 433 million.
- Paying subscribers rose to 188 million (up 14% from a year ago).
- Income from its ad-supported service is up 31%.
- Taking both subscribers and ads into account, Spotify claims that its revenue is up 20% from this same period in 2021.
- In related growth news, Spotify hosted 4.4 million podcasts at the end of June, up from 4 million in March (Q1).
Although overall revenue and subscriber news are positive, Spotify did report a $194 million dollar Q2 operating loss. However, Spotify is far from suffering from trends experienced by other media companies, such as massive layoffs and/or subscriber decreases.
Aquisitions
During Q2 2022 Spotify acquired two companies that provide technology that it thinks will elevate its service.
- Findaway: It is hoped that Findaway will help Spotify accelerate its entrance into the audiobook market.
- Sonantic: This is an AI voice platform that creates voice from text. With this acquisition, Spotify is exploring this technology as a way to expand how users interact with Spotify content and features.
Spotify Live
Spotify is committing more resources to its Spotify Live service which provides users a way to interact with both fans and content creators. Check out the details.
Where is Spotify HiFi?
The above good news, acquisitions, and commitment to Spotify Live are positive, but the long-promised addition of Spotify HiFi, first announced in early 2021, still hasn’t materialized in 2022, and there is no official word when it will, what exact form it will take, and what the pricing if any, will be.
As a result, Spotify is losing ground in the long term to services such as TIDAL, Qobuz, Amazon, and Apple Music which all offer higher resolution music streaming.
The End of Car Thing
In addition to its overall healthy state (with the exception of the Spotify HiFi mystery), Spotify has decided to discontinue its Car Thing product.
If you haven’t heard of Car Thing, you aren’t alone. Spotify launched Car Thing in April 2021 on an invite-only basis. Conceived and marketed as a car dashboard-mounted streaming device for access to Spotify content, demand never really took hold, and supply chain issues didn’t help either, so Spotify has decided to end it.
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