Spotify published its quarterly reports at the end of the week and it shows that the company already has over 195 million paying subscribers. This is 7 million more subscribers than at the end of last quarter, which means that the company will succeed in being the first to cross the threshold of 200 million paying subscribers already by the end of the year.
This is twice the number of Apple Music and when talking about all subscribers including those who do not pay it has 456 million users in total. Despite the impressive figures, it didn’t really help her and she recorded a slight decrease in gross profit, claiming that the reason for this was an incorrect adjustment to previous obligations of the copyright holders.
The company also reveals that today the service has over 4.7 million podcasts for free listening, however, in the company’s attempt to enter the audiobook field, it ran into a roadblock – only about a month after launching the new service in the US, it had to remove it. The reason is Apple. and its policy on the in-app purchase process.
When Spotify launched the option, users could purchase the desired title by clicking a button, which sends them a link to an email to pay through an external website. As soon as the sales process is finished, the title becomes available to the user within the app – and this goes against Apple’s rules, which require that every in-app purchase be made through its payment system, for which it charges a 30% commission.
Spotify’s attempt to evade the fee was unsuccessful and Apple did not allow it to update the application. Apparently, Spotify had no choice but to integrate its payment system in order not to risk removing the app from the store. Meta also has a similar interest with Apple, which added a new requirement that any purchase of a promotion deal for posts on a social network will go through the payment system.