Today, Spotify hosted our third Investor Day in New York City, offering the financial community a deeper look at our business, product strategy, and long-term vision during a year that also marks our 20th anniversary. The event featured presentations from co-CEOs Alex Norström and Gustav Söderström, leading their first Investor Day since taking the helm at the start of 2026, alongside members of our global leadership team.
Four years after introducing the concept of the Spotify Machine, the event mapped out the next evolution: a service moving from curation and recommendation into an era of generation. Powered by a proprietary Large Taste Model and fueled by 3.4 trillion daily taste signals from the most passionate fans in the world, we’re building a future of truly personal, interactive media—with the ambition to give our users more ways to create, discover, and connect.
Read on for the top takeaways from our speakers.
Our Co-CEOs opened the day by marking Spotify’s 20th anniversary and highlighting the scale we’ve built across 184 markets and 761 million active users. We now have nearly 300 million subscribers, making Spotify one of the largest subscription businesses in the world.
“Spotify is in the business of delivering creativity and culture to the world, helping artists, creators, and authors connect with audiences and grow their careers,” Alex said, adding that “the opportunity ahead has never been greater.”
They pointed to the progress we’ve made since our last Investor Day in 2022, including an 18% FXN revenue CAGR, a 32% gross margin, over 18 percentage points of operating margin expansion, and nearly €3 billion in free cash flow in 2025.
Together, they outlined four big ideas that will define our next chapter.
The first is that the world operates as a power law. And for Spotify, that opens up significant monetization. As there is no “average user,” Spotify is building a portfolio of higher-ARPU (average revenue per user) products and add-ons to capture more value from our most engaged audiences. This is already proving successful, with Audiobooks+ users delivering lifetime values that are multiples of Premium-only users.
The second is that Spotify is moving from single player and passive to multiplayer and interactive. This strategic shift came directly from observing user behavior, as we saw people organically sharing and building playlists together. Today, that behavior is scaling across the platform with features like Jam, used by almost 50 million people, and collaborative playlists, streamed by almost 50 million people, creating a network effect that strengthens real-world relationships through music.
The third centers on AI. The world is moving to generation, where our users are in control and our goal is to give them exactly that. Moving beyond curation and recommendation, the experience is now shaped by each user in real time around their specific taste, context, and intent. With features like Prompted Playlists and Taste Profile, we’re giving users more control and building the first media player for the generative era.
And fourth, “Time Well Spent.” Spotify consistently ranks among the most valuable time people spend online because we’re not focused on maximizing engagement at any cost, but on building a durable platform that users feel good about. That matters because while people may spend time on things they regret, they’re less willing to pay for them.
Gustav Gyllenhammar, SVP of Markets & Subscriptions, laid out our playbook for growth and our conviction for one day reaching one billion subscribers. The user journey begins with Free, which drives engagement, builds habits, and creates the foundation for conversion to Premium over time. From there, we invest in value, deepen retention, and expand ARPU. The same playbook continues to scale across markets, cultures, and stages of maturity. Gustav also highlighted the role of AI in accelerating the model, helping us localize faster and personalize the Freemium funnel at the right time.
He shared insights from across the globe that show the strength of the Spotify business in developed, scaling, and mature markets. In Sweden, paid penetration is approaching 50% of the population, more than 10 times the global average. In the U.S., Midia data shows that we’ve grown Premium market share by 8-10 percentage points over the last six years. In Brazil, the conversion rate has doubled to 44% since 2016, while the user base has grown fourteenfold. And in India, one of our largest markets by MAU (monthly active users), our subscriber count has grown sevenfold compared to when we presented at the last Investor Day. Across markets, this growth is powered by deep localization, from culturally resonant campaigns, local partnerships, and payment integrations.
Nicole Burrow, VP of Product Design, and Natasa Soltic, VP of Core Experience, explored how making time on Spotify valuable shapes everything we build and how we grow our business.
Spotify is where product and culture meet. The evidence starts with Wrapped, our annual personalized recap, which generated more than 620 million shares in 2025. Spotify is able to deliver a marketing campaign that becomes a cultural phenomenon year after year thanks to a simple idea: no regrets. And just last week, we launched a special in-app experience to celebrate Spotify’s 20th birthday. Almost 100 million people engaged in the first six days, helping drive our single biggest day of subscriber intake ever.
“Every day, we make deliberate choices so that time spent with Spotify feels worth it. We take ordinary moments and make them more engaging, more personal, and more meaningful through the experiences we create,” Nicole said. “This belief, and the choices we make as we build trust with the user, shapes how we design. It keeps us focused on experiences people value and deliberately choose to come back to.”
She also highlighted a recent brand affinity study showing that across major platforms, Spotify ranked No. 1 for time well spent. Asked the inverse, which service they never regret using, Spotify again ranked No. 1.
Natasa then explained how product teams start by noticing user behavior and identifying the signals that matter most. Features like SongDNA and About the Song are built from that approach, turning fan interest into deeper context, stronger engagement, and more reasons to return. Since launching in March, SongDNA has generated more than 265 million interactions. AI is also transforming the speed at which we accelerate the path from vision to execution to deliver products that give users more control, connection, and personalization.
Charlie Hellman, SVP, Global Head of Music, Joe Hadley, Global Head of Music Partnerships & Audience, and Rene Volker, Head of Live Events, took the stage to discuss the core of our business: music.
Charlie opened with the scale of our commitment to the industry. Spotify paid more than $11 billion to the music industry in 2025 alone, increasing more than 10 percent year over year. That’s more than double the growth rate of all other music revenue sources combined. All-time payouts now exceed $70 billion.
He also announced landmark licensing agreements with Universal Music Group and Universal Music Publishing Group, enabling Spotify to launch a new tool where fans can create covers and remixes from participating artists’ and songwriters’ catalogs, with consent, credit, and compensation built in from the start. The new tool will launch as a paid add-on for Spotify Premium users and create an additional source of income for artists and songwriters, on top of what they already earn on Spotify.
“Generative AI is accelerating creation at an unprecedented pace,” he said. “Alongside new, original work, there’s a surge of covers, remixes, and reinterpretations built on existing music. Without a rights system in place, artists can lose control of their work, and value can be created without flowing back to the people who made it…This is exactly the kind of problem Spotify was built to solve.”
Joe emphasized that in a world increasingly reliant on AI, human expertise becomes scarcer and more valuable. Spotify’s two decades of editorial taste and cultural instincts, combined with local knowledge and global reach, is a proprietary foundation no one can shortcut their way to. He also highlighted the growth of music videos, with more than two thirds of Premium subscribers now having watched music videos on Spotify.
Rene closed the music section with one of the day’s biggest announcements: Reserved by Spotify. For the first time, an artist’s most dedicated fans on Spotify Premium will have two tour tickets held just for them, before they go on sale to the general public. Reserved by Spotify arrives this summer with Live Nation as our launch partner. Spotify is the exclusive audio streaming service offering this type of reserved access to Live Nation tickets, helping fans get access to many of the most anticipated tours in the U.S., with more markets coming fast.
“Every streaming service has the same music,” Rene said. “Reserved is something only Spotify can offer—and that changes what it means to be a subscriber.”
Roman Wasenmüller, VP, Global Head of Podcasts, and Maya Prohovnik, VP of Podcast Product, dove into podcasts.
Roman said podcasts are now in their second year of profitability, and growth is accelerating. He explained that Spotify’s advantage comes from operating across three layers: as a consumer platform that deepens engagement, as a publisher that scales advertising, and as a set of tools that help creators monetize and grow.
He also announced the upcoming launch of Memberships, a new toolset that will allow eligible creators to offer subscriptions directly to their most dedicated fans on Spotify.
Maya showcased product innovations that are making podcasts easier to find and more valuable to use, including transcripts, automatic chapters, and real-time questions about what you’re hearing.
She also pointed to our Personal Podcasts work, noting that after seeing strong demand from users creating custom audio with their own agents and saving it to Spotify, we’re soon making it easier to generate short, private, personalized audio directly inside Spotify.
Finally, she noted our expanding fitness experience, including workout videos through our Peloton partnership. Coming soon: guided, adaptive running sessions where users can prompt Spotify for a playlist at a specific tempo and pace.
Owen Smith, VP, Global Head of Audiobooks, described our rapid expansion in books.
In two years, Spotify has grown from 150,000 to over 700,000 audiobook titles in Premium across 22 markets. Almost half of our audiobook listeners are under 35—meaningfully younger than the broader market—and we’re helping publishing unlock one of its hardest-to-reach demographics: young men. Listening hours grew 60% from 2024 to 2025, with nearly half of audiobook consumers having started listening within the last twelve months.
We’re also continuing to build tools that connect reading formats, including Page Match, which helps users move seamlessly between physical or ebook reading and audiobook listening, and our partnership with Bookshop.org that lets users purchase print books via the Spotify app.
Owen revealed Audiobooks+ is on track to reach $100 million in annualized recurring revenue this July, and we’re launching higher-hourly add-on tiers for power readers and Family and Student plans.
For authors, he announced that Spotify for Authors is expanding into 10 new languages, and that new Audiobook Creation Tools—launching in beta in early June—will give self-published authors access to digital voice generation built directly into the platform, with no exclusive deal requirements.
Prompted Playlists are also coming to audiobooks this summer, bringing natural-language discovery to books for the first time.
Katie English, Global Head of Ad Product, explained how we’ve rebuilt our advertising business around the Spotify experience. “Our ads platform should be built for Spotify, not bolted on Spotify,” she said. She highlighted the opportunity to deliver great advertising experiences across music, podcasts, and video for the 483 million people on our Free tier, all powered by a new, unified system.
She noted the growth of High Impact Sponsorships and Scaled Biddable, which together give advertisers more ways to connect with Spotify audiences through culture, performance, and automation. Biddable channels now account for more than a third of the ads business, and Spotify now operates one of the largest global audio ad exchanges.
She also pointed to strong momentum in Q1, with active advertisers up 68% year over year and significant global growth in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (up nearly 10% year over year) and Latin America (up 25% year over year). Looking ahead, Katie noted that we’re focused on growing the market for Spotify advertising, using AI to make the platform work harder, and building new ad experiences that feel more native to the Spotify environment.
Gustav Söderström returned to the stage alongside Niklas Gustavsson, VP of Engineering, to explain how Spotify is building the intelligence and infrastructure behind the next generation of personalized experiences.
Gustav explained that Spotify’s long-term AI advantage comes not from building frontier LLMs, but from applying general intelligence to our proprietary “Large Taste Model,” trained on trillions of behavioral signals and years of user interaction data across music, podcasts, and audiobooks. He described how the LTM combines multiple layers of intelligence, including user behavior, licensed metadata, creator tools, and cultural context, to move beyond recommendation into real-time generation and personalization.
Early deployments are already driving measurable engagement gains, including 9% growth in Autoplay song saves, 9% improvement in podcast discovery from Home, and nearly 20% more interaction with DJ messages. Gustav argued that AI is not simply a cost layer, but a monetization opportunity that can deepen retention, increase lifetime value, and support a tiered pricing model with premium AI-powered experiences and add-ons tailored to the platform’s most engaged users.
Niklas then highlighted how AI is transforming both how Spotify builds products and how quickly it can ship them. He pointed to Honk, Spotify’s internal AI coding agent, which automates maintenance work and helps engineers move faster with less friction. Today, 99% of Spotify engineers use AI weekly, more than 73% of code contributions are AI-assisted, and AI-powered workflows are dramatically reducing the time needed to prototype, test, and validate new ideas across the company.
Niklas also described a major shift in how users interact with Spotify. Historically, Spotify inferred intent through signals like skips and saves. With generative AI, users can now directly tell Spotify what they want in natural language, enabling more interactive and personalized experiences like DJ, Prompted Playlists, and Taste Profile.
And he introduced Studio by Spotify Labs, a standalone desktop app that takes Personal Podcasts further and will let users generate private, personalized audio experiences like daily briefings that are saved directly to Your Library in Spotify. It’ll be available soon as a Research Preview for Premium users in more than 20 markets. Studio understands your Spotify taste across music, podcasts, and audiobooks, and can draw on world knowledge to help you find the audio you want faster. You can also choose to let it take action on your behalf: researching topics, using a web browser, organizing information, and helping complete tasks across the tools you use every day.
Chief Financial Officer Christian Luiga highlighted the progress we’ve made since 2022 and the path ahead to our 2030 targets. He noted that about a third of the gross margin expansion came from the music business, with the rest driven by audiobooks and podcasting—and that today, both music and non-music verticals operate above a 30% gross margin. In 2025, the gross profit we generated from Marketplace was four times higher than 2021.
Christian also emphasized that the improvements we’ve delivered reflect a disciplined financial model: growing users and subscribers, expanding gross margin, and maintaining disciplined control of costs while investing in areas where we see clear returns. He noted that in the U.S. alone, customer LTV has increased by more than 70% since 2022, reinforcing the strength of the business model and the return profile of our investments.
Looking ahead to 2030, Christian outlined our key financial targets: a mid-teens revenue CAGR, a gross margin of 35% to 40%, an operating margin above 20%, and strong growth in free cash flow.
Christian added, “You have heard the mechanics throughout the day. The KPIs we underwrite are centered on engagement, revenue, efficiency, and retention. Our bets—from Audiobooks+ to DJ to Reserved—have clearly quantified targets tied to those drivers. And it’s the way these bets build on each other over time that drives lasting improvements in LTV.”
Alex Norström and Gustav Söderström concluded the day by reaffirming Spotify’s goals and opportunities in the years ahead. Alex said the updates shared throughout the day show why we’re confident in Spotify’s future not only because of the scale we’ve built, but because of the opportunity still ahead.
Gustav added that Spotify’s evolution has followed a clear path: first access, then personalization, now generation. Each step has expanded what Spotify can become, while compounding our advantages in scale, data, and user understanding.
Alex said, “What matters most in this next chapter—taste, trust, and culture—has always mattered to Spotify. It’s why we exist. It’s where we succeed. And it’s what we will continue building for.”
“We’re proud of what we’ve built,” Gustav said, “but we’re even more excited about the next twenty years.”
Explore all the news and announcements from Spotify’s 2026 Investor Day.
We would like to caution you that certain of the above statements represent “forward-looking statements” as defined in Section 27A of the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the United States Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. The words “will,” “expect,” “believe,” and similar words are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Examples of forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, those relating to projections or estimates about the future performance of our company. Such forward-looking statements involve significant risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from our historical experience and our present expectations or projections, including our ability to attract prospective users, retain existing users, and monetize our products and services; competition for users, their time, and advertisers; risks associated with our international operations and our ability to manage our growth and the scope and complexity of our business; risks relating to our use of artificial intelligence; and other risks as set forth in our filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. We undertake no obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances occurring after the date hereof.
The discussion above includes non-IFRS financial measures that should not be construed as alternatives to financial measures determined in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards, or IFRS. See the appendix to our Investor Day presentation available on our website for a reconciliation of these non-IFRS financial measures to the most closely comparable IFRS measures.
