Investor Day 2026 Remarks From Spotify Co-CEOs Alex Norström and Gustav Söderström
Opening remarks
ALEX
Good morning everyone, I’m Alex [Norström].
GUSTAV
And I’m Gustav [Söderström].
ALEX
Whether you’ve been following our journey since the beginning or are taking a fresh look today, thank you for joining us. Today is our opportunity to share with you why we are so excited about value creation for Spotify.
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. Gustav and I have been with Spotify since the early days. I’ve got the haircut to show for it.
Not sure if you are aware, but Spotify turns 20 this year. This marks our third Investor Day, and we’ve seen the company through many chapters. And we can say with confidence that the opportunity ahead has never been greater.
Let us tell you about where we are today:
GUSTAV
We are in 184 markets, with 761 million active users. Nearly 300 million are subscribers. This massive group of paying, passionate fans is not only double the size of any other music service, but also much more engaged than any other music service.
ALEX
That’s why almost two-thirds of all Premium music streams happen on Spotify, far more than our subscriber base alone would suggest!
GUSTAV
The majority of these subscribers come back over 25 days a month, with over 100 million of them spending more than 28 days a month with us. That’s 100 million people, with basically 100% DAU over MAU!
ALEX
That also means 3.5% of the world subscribes to Spotify. Giving us more than 96% of the world left to win over.
GUSTAV
There have been more than 10 billion playlists created, and our global user base now generates 3.4 trillion events and taste signals every day across all of our verticals and surfaces. Up 43% since just the top of the year.
ALEX
And Spotify is also one of the world’s largest music communities, with nearly 500 million people subscribing to someone else’s playlist, over 45 million people enjoying collaborative playlists each month, and almost 50 million people listening together in real-time using Jam.
GUSTAV
But Spotify is also more than music today. Over 500 million users have streamed a video podcast on Spotify, up nearly 50% year over year.
ALEX
And, in just a couple of years, we’ve already captured roughly 20% of the audiobooks market in the U.S.
Today, you’re going to hear much more from members of our team about where we’ve been and where we’re going. As most of you know, Spotify was born during the piracy era, when the music industry was in free fall. From day one, we set out to solve problems that others thought were unsolvable. This mindset has defined everything since.
So before we look ahead: Gustav, why don’t you take everyone back a bit?
GUSTAV
So—let’s go back to 2018, our first Investor Day. The big question that many were asking was, “Okay, so Spotify was right about access versus downloads. But in a world of competitors with walled gardens and massive distribution advantages, how can you possibly win?”
Our answer was counterpositioning, built on three ideas:
First, Freemium. We focused on maximizing reach while lowering the barrier to entry and building engagement. Second, ubiquity. Rather than building a walled garden, we chose to be everywhere—across devices and ecosystems. Third, personalization. We invested early in machine learning as the driver of retention. That’s pretty obvious in the age of AI, but it wasn’t back in 2013.
But of course, investors wanted to understand, “How do you win in a category where everyone licenses the same catalog?”
Our solution was that we would use Freemium to build global scale, and then we would win by out-innovating on the product itself. We didn’t rely on one or two differentiated features. We built a platform that continuously turns user behavior into new products, experiences, and ways to create value. Spotify became the R&D department of the music industry, where new offerings are tested at scale and adopted across the ecosystem.
So when we met again for our next Investor Day in 2022, four years later, we had delivered on that strategy—and more. The new question many asked was, “Spotify is now a great product, but will it ever truly be a great business with solid margins. And can you expand beyond music?”
Our answer to this question was the Spotify Machine.
The idea was to take all the capabilities we built and extend them into new verticals creating a new business model. Combining music, podcasts, and audiobooks, together into one unified experience.
ALEX
So let’s take a look at what we’ve delivered since 2022.
Let’s start with users. We’ve added nearly 340 million people. The pace of this progress puts us well on the path to 1 billion users. We grew our subscriber base by over 110 million to reach 293 million subs. This makes Spotify one of the largest subscription businesses in the world.
In revenue, we hit a currency neutral CAGR of 18%, reaching €17 billion in 2025. That almost reaches the long-term target we set. And we achieved a 32% gross margin in 2025, up from 25% in 2022—beating our 30% goal. We shifted operating margin over 18 percentage points, from around negative 6% to a positive of almost 13% in ‘25. And importantly, this has flowed through to cash. Free cash flow went from close to zero in 2022 to nearly 3 billion euros in 2025.
We’ve got a scaled, profitable business with a large and growing audience, and multiple engines of growth. The Spotify you see today is very different from the one you saw four years ago.
So how did we achieve this, while continuing to grow users, subscribers, and revenue at a high rate? First, we renewed our contracts with rightsholders in the music industry. We did this twice to make our music business model more sustainable. Second, we grew our marketplace business at a much higher velocity, which contributed to improving our gross margin. And third, we reimagined our ads and podcasting businesses. While these were hard pivots, they are putting us in a much better position long-term.
We then licensed one of the most compelling catalogs of audiobooks and added it to Spotify Premium in over 20 markets. Next, we launched global improvements to Spotify Free—making it even more competitive as a growth driver. And finally, we redesigned and reduced our org size to match our roadmaps, which resulted in operating leverage. There are countless other wins we’re not covering, but the progress is evident.
GUSTAV
Alright, so let’s jump into what you’re asking in 2026. The first is, “You’re a real business now. But is this it? Is it mostly just incremental growth from here on?”
Our answer? Absolutely not. You will hear much more throughout the day, but here are two key takeaways:
Spotify is not a single-product company and our next chapter is not just about scaling the verticals we already have. It’s about continuing to improve our current monetization while opening up new ways to monetize. Second, Spotify’s opportunity to grow goes well beyond pricing. There’s no such thing as an “average” user. Engagement and willingness to pay follow a power law and we see a clear opportunity to capture more value from our most engaged users.
The second question we’re hearing is: “What does AI mean for Spotify? Is it a tailwind or a headwind?”
Guess what? It’s a tailwind. Our view on AI is both straightforward—and somewhat contrarian to what some in the Valley will tell you. We do not believe the advantage for us comes from owning our own general reasoning frontier model—what is called an LLM. Instead we believe that general domain reasoning—like coding and math—will stay widely available. Especially given the massive investment and intense competition. Instead, our bet is that buying this capability on the open market will continue to be the most cost efficient strategy.
The advantage comes from applying general intelligence to something that’s proprietary, dynamic, and deeply personal. It essentially comes down to the unique data and context that only Spotify has about users—what is often called taste. It’s continuously refreshed, grounded in real behavior, and very hard to replicate. So rather than training general Large Language Models we are training what we call our Large Taste Model. We have also referred to this as our Large Personalization Model in the past.
This strategy lets us retain significant advantages and still benefit instantly from any frontier advances and the very aggressive price-performance-cost-curve we are seeing. We will cover this in more detail later today.
ALEX
At Spotify, we don’t capture people’s attention with empty calories. We do it by delivering an experience that people truly value. And they stay because the product earns its place in their day, every day. After nearly two decades, we understand that growth is driven by engagement and retention.
Today, most large platforms compete for time on app: minutes per day, hours per session. Spotify performs well on that dimension. From 2021 to 2025, streaming hours per subscriber increased globally by 10%. But we have never believed that all time is created equal. This is where Spotify breaks from much of the consumer internet. We are not trying to spark a binge. We are trying to become a trusted companion across more moments in people’s lives.
So we measure value not only by how long people listen, but by how often they choose to return: days in a month, not just minutes in a session. That distinction matters. Spotify fits into the morning commute, the study session, the workout, the dinner prep, the evening wind-down and the story before bed. And importantly, a growing number of those moments are spent with Spotify around the world.
People listen across every device—their iPhone, Garmin watch, Tesla, Roku, and PS5 just to name a few. In fact, the number of times you come back to us in a month and the number of devices you use might be among the most important metrics we monitor. This is how we think about engagement on Spotify.
The other key unlock to our effectiveness is our verticals. Music came first and remains the core of Spotify. Layering podcasts on top adds more days of engagement. And most recently, we’ve introduced hundreds of millions of people to audiobooks. And the result has created our most active and well retained group of all.
Those who use all three verticals—music, podcasts, and audiobooks—are engaging with Spotify almost everyday of the month. We have improved all three dimensions—use cases, devices, and verticals. And we’ve done it consistently over the last five years.
This is exactly the type of engagement and retention that drives the growth of Spotify, and we are not stopping there. We recently introduced fitness, which we believe has the potential to become a meaningful vertical in its own right. And we have our eye on several more.
Even our pricing is a retention story. We’ve raised prices multiple times with minimal churn because users see the value and stick around. What you’ll see today builds on that trajectory, continuing the Spotify growth story.
So what does all this mean for our goals through 2030? Here is what we expect to deliver: a mid-teens revenue CAGR, a gross margin of 35 to 40%, an operating margin above 20%, strong growth in free cash flow. And we also remain committed to our north stars: one billion subscribers, one hundred billion in revenue, and over 40% in gross margin.
Now, let me give you more insight into our approach to capital allocation. We will keep a strong balance sheet. This provides us with the flexibility to execute and reinvest in our strategy. We will also continue to explore inorganic investments like we always have that will strengthen our existing businesses and accelerate our strategy. We will keep countering dilution from stock-based compensation through share repurchases. We will also continue to see strong cash flow generation, and even with these efforts, we plan to start returning excess capital to our shareholders. Christian will elaborate more on these plans.
We think this is an exciting outlook. Now, I want to take you into how we plan to achieve these goals. We are betting on four big ideas.
The first is that the world operates as a power law. And for Spotify, that opens up significant monetization. Let me unpack what that means. In the industry, we often talk about averages, but as we said before, there is no such thing as an “average user.” It’s just a way to represent very different underlying usage and willingness to pay. This is our demand curve.
So far, Spotify has focused on capturing two sections of that curve. With our scaled Free tier, we can capture and monetize the very very long tail of people using Spotify—supported by ads. This is what gives us a massive universal TAM. Next, our paid tiers meet the demand with a range of options, such as our $6.99 Student plan and $12.99 individual Premium plan. That means today, we have almost 300 million people on what is one of the world’s largest subscription platforms. We have expanded this premium segment both up and down by making our plans more affordable, with Family, Duo, Student, and others. And also by raising price as we’ve added more features and offerings into Premium with minimal churn.
But there are lots of people in Premium who are prepared to spend even more based on their incredible usage. For some time, we’ve been talking about add-ons that would let us capture the full head of that curve. We all thought that music—our biggest vertical—would be first out the gate. But it turns out that it was our newest vertical, audiobooks, that got there first.
Let me tell you about Audiobooks+. As Audiobooks in Premium rolled out across our first 22 markets, we saw listening grow significantly. But what stood out was a group of highly engaged users consistently hitting their monthly listening limits. That was a clear signal of unmet demand. So we introduced Audiobooks+, allowing those users to extend their listening by purchasing an add-on for additional hours. And the response has been strong. In less than a year, more than one million users are already paying for Audiobooks+ on top of their Spotify subscription.
Even more importantly, these are very valuable users. These subscribers have lifetime values that are multiples of Premium-only users. They spend far more, and they stay much longer. And we see this power law of usage across all of our verticals, creating significant potential. In many industries, this type of demand curve typically gets divided between different players. We are one of the few companies in the world that has the business models and skills needed to cover the entire demand curve.
So from the outside, Spotify has always looked like a simple two-step funnel: Free and Premium. Large in size with a massive TAM, but ultimately capped in ARPU. But what we are outlining today is actually a platform for a diverse set of higher ARPU products. Each with smaller individual TAMs, but much higher ARPUs. And thanks to our scale, this represents many millions of users, and a tremendous upside.
This is just the beginning of our next monetization chapter. Today, Charlie will show that music fans will be able to interact with their favorite music in entirely new ways. Something we know that you’ve all been waiting for. And as Roman and Maya will explain, we will allow users to create truly Personal Podcasts for the first time in addition to unlocking creator Membership add ons. And finally, Owen will talk to you about what is next for audiobooks, which I won’t spoil. But it turns out that even Audiobooks+ didn’t satisfy the full demand curve of our user base. Book lovers are asking for Audiobooks++ and +++.
Across all of these use cases, the opportunity is consistent. We will give our most engaged users the ability to pay for more, so that they can use more, control more and access more.
GUSTAV
This brings us to the second big idea we’re doubling down on—Spotify is moving from single player and passive to multiplayer and interactive. When our users adopt new behaviors, even before the product fully supports them, we pay attention. That signal is one of our most valuable advantages.
We see what people do, what they choose, what they share, and even what they say to Spotify in natural language. So years ago, we saw something interesting in how our playlists were used. One person would start a playlist, their friends would text back and forth to add songs, and then the original creator could share it with the group. At the time, Spotify wasn’t designed for collaboration, but the signal was clear: people didn’t just want to listen, they wanted to listen together.
So we added on-platform messaging and created the shareable playlist. Now it’s everywhere with more than half a billion people subscribing to someone else’s playlist. And then we went all in on these network effects, introducing Jam—a way for users to listen with their friends and family in real time. With nearly 50 million people jamming together, we are seeing even more engaged users. Collaborative Playlists are another popular Spotify invention, which turned playlisting into something groups build, share, and revisit. With almost 50 million people streaming from a collaborative playlist, we’ve made music something you do together. All of this results in a simple fact—you need to be on Spotify.
Our experience is not about amassing followers or meeting strangers. It is about real-life connection and hanging out with your people.
GUSTAV
The next big idea centers on AI. The world is moving to generation, where our users are in control and our goal is to give them exactly that. Spotify launched in the era of curation, where the world’s music was organized by our passionate users into tens of billions of playlists, building one of the richest collections of human taste signals ever assembled.
Next came recommendation, powered by algorithms and machine learning. We turned those billions of curation signals into features like Discover Weekly, Release Radar, and personalized surfaces that made discovery effortless for hundreds of millions of people.
Now we’re entering the era of generation, where the experience isn’t just selected from a catalog. It’s shaped by each of our users, in real time, around their taste, context, and intent.
For example, with generative AI—for the first time in history—it’s now possible to create and consume truly personal media—individual media. A podcast that was made for an audience of just you or at most—you and a friend. When you ask Spotify to “give me the news” we will deliver a daily brief built around your interests, your inbox, your calendar, even the presentation you have later that day. But this media obviously needs a trusted, private space, not a public feed. So we’ve built exactly that!
We’re already seeing people take advantage of this with tools like Save to Spotify, where you can use your agent like Claude Code, OpenClaw, or Codex to create individualized content. Like a narrated travel plan for your trip to Barcelona or dive deeper into a subject like the Token Economy based on what you’ve shared with your agent, like notes, articles, files, and more.
Today, there is no media player for both public and private content—or put differently—there is no media player for the generative era. We believe Spotify will become that.
Another way of thinking about this generative era is that “computers finally understand English!” This puts infinite creativity and control in the user’s hands. For example, Prompted Playlists. Where you can ask it to create a playlist using your listening history. Or to create one around who won Best New Artist. A fan favorite? “Make me a playlist with main character energy and send it to me every Monday morning to get me pumped up and confident for the week.” And if you want to shape Spotify more broadly, Taste Profile lets you tell Spotify who you are, and even who you aspire to be. No one else offers this level of control. Spotify truly becomes your media service.
ALEX
And that brings us to our fourth big idea: Time Well Spent. The most precious commodity we each possess is our own time. Yet across much of the internet, too many platforms treat time as something to be captured not respected. Feeds keep you endlessly scrolling, often leaving you feeling regretful and empty.
We believe there is another path. We enable experiences that generate love and bring joy, inspiration, and insights. So that the time you spend with us doesn’t deplete you, it energizes you. We actively measure not just time spent, but how much of that time users consider valuable versus regrettable. And Spotify consistently ranks among the most valuable time that people spend online. In our surveys, users report feeling good almost 90% of the time they spend on Spotify.
That stands in sharp contrast to broader industry patterns, where users, especially younger ones, report actually regretting up to 40% of the time they spend on other platforms. And in some cases, they regret closer to 70% of their time.
This is what makes Spotify different. We are not maximizing engagement at any cost. We are building for something more satisfying and importantly, more durable. And this is not just good for users—it is good for business too. Because it turns out that all time is not created equal, and people are willing to pay for time that they value.
And with that, let me invite another Gustav—I’m living in a world of Gustavs—Gustav Gyllenhammar, to show you how this translates into subscriber growth around the world.
Closing remarks
ALEX
Okay, so this brings us to the close of our presentation. Hopefully, after today’s update, you have a clear picture of Spotify’s future.
The scale we’ve built unlocks vast opportunities for value creation. The world is moving in our direction, towards more personalized experiences, more interactivity, and more control. And these are areas where we know we can lead—because living in the future has been part of our DNA for a long time. Never getting comfortable. Looking to see where technology, behavior, and culture are heading before it becomes obvious to everyone else.
That instinct has shaped some of our biggest decisions over the years and enabled us to define and build for what comes next. 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.
GUSTAV
That’s what has helped us build lasting differentiation, increase our engagement, and evolve the business over time to not only meet, but exceed, the expectations of our hundreds of millions of users.
We started with access, moved to personalization, and now generation. Each transition has expanded what Spotify can become. And every time, our advantage has continued to compound.
Because the generative era rewards scale, data, and deep user understanding more than any era before it. What excites us most about this journey, isn’t any single feature. It’s the entire foundation underneath it all.
We’re proud of what we’ve built. But we’re even more excited about the next twenty years. And we will continue to raise our ambitions. Thank you.
Explore all the news and announcements from Spotify’s 2026 Investor Day.
Forward-looking statements:
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.
Non-IFRS financial measures:
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.
