Spotify Reveals It Has 20m+ Premium Subscribers

Spotify faces some big competition from newly unveiled Apple Music, but for now things are looking up: the service has revealed its latest subscriber numbers, and they show good things for the company. Millions of new subscribers are on board with Spotify, and that includes a substantial number of users subscribing to Spotify Premium, the ad-free for-pay service that gets rid of ads and certain other limitations like being restricted to shuffle play. The numbers come shortly after Spotify's successful funding round.

Spotify has announced that it has more than 20 million paying subscribers on its Spotify Premium service, and that its total number of active users has increased to 75 million. This is contrasted with the 10 million paying users it had by the end of May 2014, and 40 million active users.

This means Spotify saw its number of paying subscribers increase by 10 million in a single year, marking a big jump over the 5+ years it took the service to reach its first 10 million Premium subscribers. The company further boasts that this means a new subscriber signed up every three seconds for a year.

The company also wants to make sure music artists are paying attention, and points out that with its growth the amount it dishes to artists in royalties also grows. Thus far Spotify says it has paid in excess of $3 billion in royalties, and that more than $300 million of that was in the first three months of this year. The graph above demonstrates this growth.

SOURCE: Spotify