The Wall Street Journal has been digging into Spotify’s recently-published financial accounts for 2011, revealing that the streaming music service’s revenues rose 154% year-on-year to €187.8m in 2011, although net losses widened from €28.5m in 2010 to €45.4m in 2011 as the service rolled out around the world.
Music Ally readers with long memories may remember these figures being reported in the Swedish press earlier this year, incidentally.
Still, here’s more detail from the latest filing: 83% of Spotify’s 2011 revenues came from subscriptions, versus 71.2% in 2010. The service ended 2011 with 32.8m registered users, although the company said recently that it has “more than 15m active users”, while Facebook’s stats suggest it had 25.9m monthly actives at the end of July 2012.
Spotify continues to be a lightning rod for criticism of streaming music business models – those widening losses will fuel more debate on what’s required for the company to ever turn a profit. In April, CEO Daniel Ek described such speculation as “Irrelevant. Our focus is entirely on growth. It is priority one, two, three, four and five”.
More funding may be required – something reiterated in the latest financial filing. Meanwhile, much of the media coverage of the report has chosen to focus less on the financials and more on the section covering Spotify’s ambitions to launch in Canada, Asia and Latin America.
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RT @MusicAlly: Spotify’s 2011 financials go under the microscope: http://t.co/3pzEDe0W