KOLKATA: Spotify Technology (Spotify) has added eight million Spotify Premium subscribers globally in Q2 touching 138 million, up by 27 per cent over-year-over. The popular audio streaming service’s monthly active users rose to 299 million, up by 29 per cent. 

“Family Plan continues to be a significant driver of our outperformance. This quarter we expanded the availability of both Family Plan and our new Duo offering to new geographies. Following our launch in Russia and 12 surrounding markets on 15 July (post Q2), these multi-user plans are now available in 90+ territories globally. We saw strong subscriber growth across all regions in the quarter and finished ahead of our expectations,” Spotify said in a letter to shareholders.

Ad-supported revenue of $131 million was down both year-over-year and sequentially. Last quarter, Spotify noted a marked deceleration in sales brought on by the global health crisis where the last three weeks in March were down more than 20 per cent relative to the forecast. While the performance continued to lag the company’s expectations through April and May, it significantly outperformed expectations in the month of June. 

“We mentioned coming out of Q1 that the last three weeks of Q1were pretty weak and saw some big decline and that continued into April and May. We were actually running behind on the ads business for April and May, probably down about 25 per cent on those two months and then we really had a nice pick up in June. June was only down about 10 per cent on the advertising side,” Spotify CFO Paul Vogel said.

Its podcast segment engagement in general overall is increasing as now 21 per cent of its MAU is engaged with podcasts which is up from 19 per cent and consumption was up over 100 per cent in the quarter.

On the other side, premium revenue grew 17 per cent year over year to $1,758 million. Within Premium, average revenue per user of $4.41 in Q2 was down 9 per cent year-over-year.