Shares of Spotify jumped as much as 12% in pre-market trading on Monday after the company saw improved profitability and stronger than expected user growth in its fourth quarter.
The music streaming giant added 9 million premium subscribers for a total of 290 million, or 10% growth year over year. Total monthly active users (MAUs) grew by a record 38 million, or 11%, to 751 million, while ad-supported MAUs grew 12% to 476 million.
The premium subscriber and MAU growth was driven by growth across all regions, with outperformance led by Spotify’s Rest of World, Latin America and Europe segments. Premium growth also benefitted from “strong holiday promotional campaign intake,” while MAU growth was boosted by the global launch of mobile free tier enhancements and strong holiday and Wrapped campaigns.
Premium revenue grew 8% to €4.01 billion, driven by subscriber gains, while ad-supported revenue fell 4% to €518 million. Music advertising was driven by growth in impressions sold, offset by “softness in pricing.” Podcasting growth was led by sponsorship gains, offset by “optimization” of Spotify’s podcasting inventory in its owned & licensed portfolio.
In 2025, Spotify paid out more than $11 billion to the music industry, with independent artists and labels accounting for half of all royalties. It also helped artists generate more than $1 billion in ticket sales by connecting fans with live shows through its ticketing partners.
Additionally, Spotify delivered its biggest Wrapped yet, engaging over 300 million users, with 630 million shares in 56 languages globally, representing increases of 20% and 42%, respectively. The first day of its Wrapped campaign marked the highest single day of “subscriber intake” in Spotify history.
“It’s incredible to think that we now serve over three quarters of a billion people around the world,” Spotify co-CEO Alex Norström said in a statement. “We’re framing 2026 as the Year of Raising Ambition. 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.”
Here are the quarter’s results:
Net income: A profit of €1.17 billion, compared to a profit of €899 million a year ago.
Earnings Per Share: $4.43 per diluted share, compared to $2.85 per share expected by analyst estimates compiled by Yahoo Finance.
Total revenue: €4.53 billion, up 7% year over year, compared to $4.52 billion expected by analyst estimates compiled by Yahoo Finance.
Operating income: €701 million, compared to €582 million a year ago.
In January, Spotify said it would raise prices for its premium subscribers in the U.S. across its individual, duo, family and student ad-free plans, marking its third price hike in four years.
Looking ahead at its first quarter of fiscal 2026, Spotify expects to add 3 million premium subscribers for a total of 293 million and 8 million MAUs for a total of 759 million. It also anticipates revenue of €4.5 billion and operating income of €660 million, the latter of which includes €10 million in social charges.
At the end of 2025, Spotify had 7,323 full-time employees globally, up slightly from 7,261 employees a year earlier.
Spotify expands features, video podcast and audio book offerings
Video podcast consumption on Spotify has increased by more than 90% since the launch of its Partner Program, with more than 530,000 video podcast shows on the platform. A selection of of sports, culture, lifestyle and true crime video podcasts from Spotify Studios and The Ringer made their debut on Netflix in the U.S., with other markets to follow.
During the quarter, Spotify launched Page Match, a new feature that will allow its users to scan the page of a printed book or ebook and continue the story in the app at the moment they left off, and Audiobook Recaps, which help listeners jump back into stories with short, personalized summaries, covering the portion of the book they’ve already heard. Listeners in the U.S. and U.K. will also be able to buy physical books through the Spotify app through a new partnership with Bookshop.org, which supports independent local bookstores.
Spotify also expanded audiobooks to more markets, adding hundreds of thousands of titles in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Monaco, and extended a partnership with La Liga pro soccer club FC Barcelona through 2030.
Additionally, Spotify launched its partner program for creators in the Nordics and expanded its beta for prompted playlists, which uses AI-powered personalization to allow premium users in select markets to describe exactly what they want to hear. It also rolled out its music videos beta to premium users in the U.S. and Canada, giving fans access to a growing catalog of official videos, from studio releases to live performances and covers, in 111 markets.
“What we’ve really built is a technology platform for audio – and increasingly, for all the ways creators connect with audiences. And this identity will matter even more going forward,” Spotify founder and executive chairman Daniel Ek said. “The next wave of technology shifts – AI, new interfaces, wearables, new ways of interacting with content – these will reshape how people discover and experience audio and media. The hard problems ahead – in music, in podcasts, in books, in video, in live, and in things we haven’t built yet – we’re going to keep building the technology to solve them.”
Spotify touts AI opportunity
Spotify executives also said that they expect to be among the winners in the global shift being caused by artificial intelligence.
“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,” co-CEO Gustav Söderström said. “The entire industry stands to benefit from this paradigm shift but we believe those who embrace this change and move fast, will benefit the most.”
More to come…
