Spotify Just Turned an Annual Profit for the First Time Ever
To give some perspective on Spotify’s long road to steady profitability, the company was founded all the way back in 2006.

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Wise men including but not limited to Elvis Presley say only fools rush in, and Spotify has certainly taken its sweet time achieving profitability.
On Tuesday, the streaming colossus reported its full-year results for 2024, revealing it turned its first-ever annual profit to the tune of €1.14 billion ($1.2 billion). It’s the first real glimpse we’ve had of annual profitability for a major music streamer, as many of Spotify’s biggest competitors in the space are owned by Big Tech companies that bundle their music streaming revenues together with other services.
The Long and Winding Road
To give some perspective on Spotify’s long road to steady profitability, the company was founded in 2006. It’s pretty extraordinary that TV and film streamers like Netflix were able to hit annual profitability ahead of Spotify when you consider the overhead they pour into producing shows and movies, but here we are. In Spotify’s case, overhead has turned into a badge of honor — last week as a sort of curtain-raiser to Monday’s results, it announced it had paid the music industry a total of $10 billion in 2024.
Yet even as it was handing out cash to the music industry, Spotify was trimming costs elsewhere. An ingredient in its newfound profitability is a slimmed-down workforce:
- The company announced it was cutting 17% of its workforce in late 2023, totalling 1,500 jobs. That followed 800 pink slips earlier in the year, meaning a total reduction of 23% since 2022.
- Spotify’s profitable year wasn’t solely due to cost-cutting, as it also announced a surprisingly chunky increase in the number of subscribers, which climbed 11% in the fourth quarter from a year earlier.
Silent Competition: Big music streaming rivals to Spotify include YouTube Music, Apple Music, and (to a lesser extent) Amazon Music. These streaming platforms are part of much bigger tech companies than Spotify, and so their exact revenues and losses are harder to scrutinize, making it tough to get a grip on exactly how Spotify is performing in relation to its peers. One thing that seems clear: Spotify has a much, much bigger audience than the Big Tech companies’ offerings. This time last year, YouTube’s Global Head of Music Lyor Cohen said the platform had reached 100 million subscribers. At the same time last year, Spotify announced it had 236 million paid subscribers, and 602 million monthly active users.