Spotify, Live Nation's Q2 Revenue Report + Youtube 2019 Analytics

Spotify’s Revenue Report for Q2 2020

• Spotify’s Q2 Earnings Call took place on Wednesday, 29 July and here are a couple notes on how the streaming company performed for the quarter ending June 30.

• Spotify revealed that the platform now has 138m premium subscribers globally, up by 8m subscribers from figure reported in Q1. In the previous earnings call, the company forecasted it’ll hit between 133m & 138m in subscribers by Q2. It did just about that.

• Owing to this growth, Spotify’s premium revenue hit €1.758bn in Q2, up by €58m (3%) from the figure reported in the prior quarter.

• Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, digital ad revenues performed below the company’s expectation, with revenue from its freemium model hitting €131m, declining by €17m (-11%) from figures posted in the prior quarter.

• Spotify’s global Monthly Active User (MAU) count at the end of Q2 reached 299m up by 13m reported in the previous quarter. It forecasted its MAU would hit between 289m and 299m, and it did.

• Spotify earned total revenue of €1.889bn in Q2 2020; showing that its freemium model contributed just 6.9% of the total revenue reported, and the premium model making up 93.1%. Spotify forecasted its total revenue would reach between €1.75bn & €1.95bn in Q2, and it did.

• Spotify posts a €167m quarterly operating loss, €294m in finance costs then a net loss of €356m in Q2.

• According to the company, Latin America remains one of its fastest growing regions, with a 33% increase in monthly active users YoY.

• In-car listening is still less than it was prior to the pandemic though it’s increasing gradually.

• The number of monthly active users listening to podcasts saw a small increase from 19% to 21% but the amount of content they’re consuming more than doubled.

• Spotify’s ‘top tier’ of artists - those accounting for the top 10% of its streams - has grown to over 43,000 compared to 30,000 a year ago. According to Spotify, the goal is to have about a million artists of this sort.

Live Nation’s Revenue Report for Q2 2020

According to Live Nation, “our expectation is that live events will return at scale in the summer of 2021, with ticket sales ramping up in the quarters leading to these shows,” as it published its latest financial results. 

In the second quarter of 2020, Live Nation’s revenue from concerts were just $141.8m compared to $2.46bn in the same quarter a year ago. It’s revenues from ticketing is -$87m, compared to $370.8m a year ago, while its sponsorship and advertising revenues also plummeted from $151.5m to $18.4m

Its overall revenue dropped by 98% from $3.16bn a year ago to just $74.1m in Q2. An operating profit of about $171.6m a year ago became a $588.1m loss last quarter. This is evidently courtesy of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Youtube 2019 Analytics

An analytics firm, Pex have published their ‘the state of Youtube’ report detailing the platform’s performance for last year, ending December 31 2019.

• According to the report, 0.77%, less than 1% of all videos on Youtube had more than 100k views.

• The majority of Youtube views (88.4%) had more than 1k views.

• Music was responsible for 83% of videos exceeding 1 billion views on Youtube last year.

• According to the report, there’s explosive growth in Gaming uploads. The majority of new videos (33%) are uploaded to the gaming category.

• For the “10-100m” and “100m-1 billion” views tiers, Music has the largest share of total videos, with a 30% and 57% share of these tiers respectively.