Spotify is considered the world's largest music streaming service, with a clear gap ahead of its rivals such as Apple Music and Amazon Music, and as such it has big expectations to fulfill.
It's been generally good news for the music streamer, with recent results showing Spotify has increased its premium subscribers. Despite being embroiled in controversey due to issues surrounding its popular podcast host Joe Rogan, the service hasn't seen much undue effects. But the war in Ukraine has put a dent in those numbers since Spotify chose to leave Russia in light of "recently enacted legislation".
In the quarter that ended March 31, Spotify reported premium subscribers rose 15 percent year-on-year to 182 million, up two million from the previous quarter (thanks The Verge). But the company did take a hit, missing its targets slightly due to leaving its Russia operations. "Excluding the impact of our exit from Russia, subscriber growth exceeded expectations", the company said in a press release.
Spotify confirmed that it would suspend its Russia services last month, and said it expected to be fully shuttered by the end of April. It announced that it'd seen 1.5 million subscription drop-outs as a consequence of the news and expects another 600,000 more disconnects this month, bringing the total to more than two million. Spotify launched its Russia service only a couple years ago and went to say it was its "most successful new market launch to date".
As The Verge reported, Spotify made a profit of €131 million this quarter, although the Swedish company tends to emphasise subscriber growth over quarterly revenues and profit which means this recent profit news is relatively infrequent.
Spotify had come under fire after prominent musicians such as Joni Mitchell and Neil Young pulled their music from the service after concerns with Joe Rogan's podcast for spreading vaccine misinformation. A Twitter hashtag #SpotifyDeleted appeared soon after and started to trend. But Rogan has revealed that he not only didn't lose subscribers due to the incident, but actually gained more. "It's interesting, my subscriptions went up massively, that's what's crazy. During the height of it all, I gained two million subscribers," Rogan said in a recent episode.