Photo Credit: Rubaitul Azad
Spotify’s Q2 2026 financials are in, and thanks in part to 300 million paid subscribers, the DSP is now knocking on the door of 800 million overall users. However, execs are anticipating slower growth for 2026’s third quarter.
All told, Spotify pointed to an average of 777 million monthly active users (MAUs) for Q2 2026, reflecting a 12% year-over-year (YoY) improvement. Therein, the aforementioned Premium customer base grew 9% YoY, with 494 million ad-supported users (up 14% YoY) rounding out the total, according to the report.
In keeping with a long-running trend, this user growth was concentrated in markets outside North America and Europe; Rest of World (37%) and Latin America (21%) now make up a noteworthy 58% of Spotify’s MAUs.
And while Europe and North America are still leading the pack on the paid side, Rest of World and Latin America account for a combined 39% of subscribers – including a 24% share for Latin America.
Regarding the hard financials behind these totals, Premium revenue is said to have increased by 15% YoY to €4.33 billion (currently $4.99 billion), compared to a modest 1% YoY uptick for ad-supported revenue ($513.81 million/€446 million) despite the sizable MAUs gain.
At the risk of oversimplifying a multifaceted topic, it’s worth noting in passing that Spotify’s Q2 Premium revenue growth outpaced the percentage boosts attributable to both Warner Music and Universal Music in recorded music for the same quarter.
Furthermore, several recalibrations, expansions, partnerships, and free-tier changes later, is Spotify poised to right the advertising ship once and for all? Time will tell, though the company did acknowledge 33,000 active on-platform advertisers, up 60% YoY.
“People are now actually prompting to create campaigns and audio assets,” co-CEO Alex Norström added during the earnings call. “I think out of the 33,000 active advertisers, we now have 7,000 of them using our AI audio asset creation tool, which just makes it easier for brands to buy on Spotify.”
Next, operating income jumped 61% YoY to $754.59 million/€655 million, with a gross margin of 33.4% and net income of $628.04 million/€545 million. Looking ahead to the remainder of the current quarter, Spotify is anticipating total revenue of $5.76 billion/€5 billion as well as an average of 788 million MAUs, including 305 million subscribers.
(“We’re starting to pull the monetization lever,” Norström said of the comparatively measured MAU net-adds forecast of 11 million, referring in part to pricing adjustments and new-release paywalls.)
On the share-price front, Spotify stock (NYSE: SPOT) was hovering above $500 a pop at the time of this writing, for a 4% boost from opening but a 23% falloff from the same point in August 2025.
Finally, the previously noted call didn’t deliver any particularly groundbreaking takeaways; the Prompted Playlist feature is hitting audiobooks, to name one announcement.
However, following UMG head Lucian Grainge’s mention of ongoing gen AI opt-in discussions with artists, Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström stressed that the new features needn’t launch with “a full catalog.”
“[Y]ou should expect to see a research preview coming out of our model where we start to give this to some users,” Söderström indicated of Merlin-partnered Spotify’s upcoming gen AI offering.
“For that, we do not require, as we’ve said before, a full catalog,” he continued. “Why is this important for us? This is not a test of the product. It is the thing that guarantees that the product will be very good. For those of you who know about machine learning, you know that one of the most important phases is the post-training using reinforcement learning.
“[W]e will allow people who are fans of a certain artist to start making remixes with songs from that artist. What they do is they say, ‘I think this remix was better than this remix.’ Then we get the preference data that actually makes the model better. This is our unique advantage in this business,” Söderström finished.
