Spotify reports $118 million loss despite adding more users, paid subscribers

Credit: Spotify

The chief Apple Music competitor now has 320 million monthly active users and 144 million paid subscribers. Spotify attributed the growth in both of those sections to marketing in India and a launch in Russia and 12 other markets.

Despite reporting revenue growth of 14% to about $2.32 billion, the streaming service still reported a loss of $118 million. In the third quarter of 2019, the company actually made a profit of $282 million.

In the year-ago quarter, Spotify had 248 million monthly active users and 113 paid subscribers. Year-over-year, Spotify revenue per-user dropped about 10%. Largely, that's due to the fact that the service is luring in new subscribers with discounted plans.

Several months after securing an exclusive deal with "The Joe Rogan Experience," Spotify says that the podcast is now the platform's most popular. There are about 1.9 million podcasts available on the streaming now, up from $1.5 million quarter-over-quarter. More users appear to be engaging with podcasts, too, representing about a 1% increase from Q2 2020.

Apple Music, for its part, reported that it had 60 million paying subscribers as of last year. The Apple music service does not have a free tier, and while it doesn't offer subscriber counts as frequently as Spotify, some light could be shed on its performance on Apple's Thursday earnings call.