Shares of Spotify dipped Wednesday after the company reported its first-quarter 2022 earnings.
The stock was down 11% in the afternoon amid a tough earnings season for tech stocks.
Here are the key numbers:
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Earnings per share: 21 euro cents vs. an estimated loss of 24 euro cents, per Refinitiv
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Revenue: 2.66 billion euros vs. 2.62 billion euros, per Refinitiv
The company, which has heavily invested in its podcasting business and is trying to grow ads in the space, said ad-supported revenue came in at 282 million euros.
That made up 11% of its total revenue, which the company said was its largest first quarter ever for the segment.
Still, it missed analyst expectations of 304.1 million euros in ad-supported revenue, according to FactSet.
Spotify ended the quarter with 182 million paid subscribers, which is up 15% year over year but falls below its original forecast of 183 million.
The company said exiting Russia led to a loss of 1.5 million subscribers.
Revenue from subscriptions grew to 2.38 billion euros, up 23% year over year.
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Spotify reached 422 million monthly active users, or MAUs, in its first quarter; up 19% year over year and exceeding its own guidance by 4 million. It also beat analyst expectations, according to a FactSet consensus.
Spotify had 4 million podcasts on its platform at the end of the quarter; up from 3.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2021.
Growth in the number of MAUs who engaged with its podcasts have continued to outpace total MAU growth; while podcast share of overall consumption hours on the platform reached an all-time high, the company said.
Spotify said that during March, when there was a brief service outage that caused users to be automatically logged out of the platform, about 3 million users likely created new accounts to log back in.
The company said that in April, one month after the outage; it saw a reversal of that benefit.
Spotify expects to post 428 million MAUs in its second quarter, which reflects a loss from the closure of its Russian operations as well as the full reversal of its March service outage benefit.
The company expects to reach 187 million total paid subscribers.
