Spotify’s $159M Loss in Q1 2019 Hides Growing Success

Swedish streaming platform Spotify (NYSE: SPOT) has released its financial report for the first quarter of 2019. Statistics reveal that most performance predictions by Spotify and analysts were accurate, despite reporting a $159M net loss.

Numbers for premium subscribers hit 100 million, up from the top 99.2 million prediction. Monthly active users (MAUs) were practically right on target, as were premium revenues, yet earnings per share (EPS) fell short by nearly 50%.

In a recent podcast interview on Freakonomics with Stephen Dubner, Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek stated:

“I’m actually very little focused on what a company is worth or isn’t, or if that’s fair. There’s something called a Wall Street which is really focused on that instead. I don’t really focus on that. We at Spotify are interested in is how do we get a music industry which actually participates in all of the income streams?”

Spotify recently expanded into India, a market with a virtually undeveloped music industry. With potential to grow the industry beyond a sidecar to Bollywood films. According to Ek, 90% of the music in India is produced for Bollywood films. Spotify is looking to capture the production market and capture almost 1.3 billion potential users, with 2 million already.

See Spotify’s infographic of the report below, and read the full financial report here.