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Spotify Now has 100M Paying Users

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Only a week ago, Amazon announced its ad-supported music streaming service for its Alexa users, and now, another famous music streaming service Spotify has revealed that it has registered a 100 million paid subscribers, in its Q1 2019.

The company has become the world’s largest music streaming service, and the first one to touch the 100 million paid subscribers’ milestone. The increase in the number of paying users for Spotify has hiked by 32 per cent of the number of users it had in 2018 Q4.

Noticeably, the Spotify had just launched its service in India, in February this year, and since then, it has registered over 2 million users for its music streaming service for both paid and ad-supported version, making a total of 217 million subscribers serving in 79 markets. In fact, its rival Apple Music is still at 50 million paid subscribers.

Despite the increased number of subscribers, the Q1 2019 profits are way lesser than the profits it had earned in December 2018. The revealed profits for Q1 2019 by the company is $158 million, whereas, last year in December it had $493 million in revenues. But still, the company has increased its part in the investment for Tencent Music and is readily working in improving its podcast service.

“Over time, our ambition is to develop a more robust advertising solution for podcasts that will allow us to layer in the kind of targeting, measurement, and reporting capabilities we have for the core ad-supported business,” the company said.

Spotify has been working on its ad-supported podcast service, through which it will allow the producers to place ads in between the podcast depending on the target users. Recently, the company acquired the podcast network Gimlet Media, Anchor FM, and Parcast for a combined investment of $400 million. The company is expecting to see a rise in its revenues through its podcast service in the Q2 2019.

Along with the podcast service, the company is also looking forward to an increase in the number of subscribers for both its paid and free music streaming service as well as the profits for Q2 2019 through it.

Spotify App Launched in India Providing Access to Forty Million Songs

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Amid a legal conflict with music label Warner Music Group, Spotify, successfully launched its app for the Indian users yesterday. The company quietly rolled out the app for the Indian users on Wednesday, and it is also expected that the Indian Spotify app may be used to test the upcoming features to the app.

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Image Source: rollingstone.com

With the launch of the app, Spotify will provide its Indian users with access to over 40 million songs, and in different languages including Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, and Telugu, etc. The app is specially designed for the Indian users, such that they will be able to create playlists for the trending songs in the major cities of India. The app also offers on-demand songs with a free account.

“India has an incredibly rich music culture, and to best serve this market, we’re launching a custom-built experience,” Spotify founder and CEO, Daniel Ek, said in a statement. “Not only will Spotify bring Indian artists to the world, but we’ll also bring the world’s music to fans across India.”

The app is offering various different plans for its users in India. The offers include one day to monthly plans, under which for one day access the users need to pay 13 rupees ($0.18), for a week they have to pay 39 rupees ($0.55), and one single month plan is for 129 rupees ($1.81). Spotify has also introduced the student plans offering discounts up to 50 per cent.

Although the company had set up its office in India last year and had plans to launch the app in India in the month of February in the same year, in order to get the licensing deals with major record labels including Sony, Universal and Warner Music, the launch got delayed for a whole year.

Even though the company has finally launched the app in India, it is a bit late, as there are many other companies including Apple Music, Google Play/YouTube Music, JioSaavn, Gaana, and Amazon, that are already ruling the music streaming industry in India. So it can be a bit tough for the company to establish itself in the Indian music streaming industry amid the high competition.

The Sweden-based company Spotify is operating since 2007 in several other countries, having a huge client base across the globe. As of February 2019 records, the company is catering to 207 million total monthly active users, including 96 million paying subscribers.