Spotify racked up its highest quarterly net adds of monthly users to date in Q4 2025 — reaching a total of 751 million monthly active users, a gain of 38 million in the period. Its paid-subscriber count grew 10% year over year to 290 million, a pickup of 9 million sequentially.
Revenue of €4.53 billion in the year-end quarter was up 7% (or 13% on a constant-currency basis), in line with forecasts. Gross margin improved to 33.1% (vs. 32.2% in the year-earlier period) and operating income rose 47% to €701 million, beating expectations.
For Q1, Spotify is expecting more moderate users gains. It forecast total MAUs hitting 759 million, which would be a net gain of 8 million. Premium subs are expected to reach 293 million (a net add of 3 million), coming as it has raised subscription prices in the U.S., marking its third price hike in four years. The company projected total Q1 2026 revenue of €4.5 billion (implying growth of 7%), gross margin of 32.8% and operating income of €660 million.
Spotify started 2026 with a change in the C-suite: Founder Daniel Ek stepped aside as CEO to become executive chairman and as of Jan. 1, the company is led by two co-CEOs: Gustav Söderström, former co-president and chief product and technology officer, and Alex Norström, previously co-president and chief business officer.
Norström, in prepared remarks, said Spotify is “framing 2026 as the Year of Raising Ambition,” after closing out what it had dubbed the “Year of Accelerated Execution.”
“It’s incredible to think that we now serve over three quarters of a billion people around the world,” Norström said. Commenting on the year ahead, he said, “We were founded to solve what felt like the impossible, and ambition has been the driving force behind our success from our earliest days. And ambition will be a guiding principle of our next chapter.”
Ek, in prepared remarks with the Q4 earnings announcement, said Spotify has effectively built “a technology platform for audio — and increasingly, for all the ways creators connect with audiences.” He said the company will “keep building the technology” for “the hard problems ahead,” citing major tech shifts like AI and wearables.
Söderström added: “We consider ourselves the R&D department for the music industry. Our job is to understand new technologies quickly and capture their potential, which we’ve done time and again. The entire industry stands to benefit from this [AI] paradigm shift but we believe those who embrace this change and move fast, will benefit the most.”
In Q4 2025, subscription revenue increased 8% to €4.01 billion, offsetting a 4% decline in advertising revenue. On a constant-currency basis, ad sales increased 4% the company as music advertising was driven by growth in impressions sold partially offset by “softness in pricing.” Growth in podcasting ad revenue was led by sponsorship gains, partially offset by “optimization of our podcasting inventory” in Spotify’s owned and licensed portfolio.
In Q4, Spotify began rolling out music videos in beta in the U.S. and Canada and announced the extension of its sponsorship pact with La Liga pro soccer club FC Barcelona through 2030.
In announcing earnings, Spotify boasted that its 2025 Wrapped year-end marketing campaign was its biggest ever, with more than 300 million users making more than 630 million shares on social media worldwide in 56 languages.
As previously announced, Spotify in 2025 paid out more than $11 billion to the music industry, which the company said is the largest annual payment to music creators “from any retailer in history,” with independent artists and labels accounting for half of all royalties. Spotify also claimed it has helped artists generate more than $1 billion in ticket sales to date.
Meanwhile, last week Spotify launched Page Match, a new feature that lets users can scan a page of a printed book or ebook and continue the story in the audiobook on Spotify at the moment they left off. Later this spring, users in the U.S. and U.K. will be able to buy physical books through the Spotify app via a new partnership with Bookshop.org, which supports independent local bookstores.