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Comment by CrypticShift | Hacker News Reader

The article mentions that the project has over 600K monthly users, which is a significant number for a side project. However, in comparison to Spotify's user base of 1000 times more, it now seems insignificant. This reminds me of how companies like Google only consider services with hundreds of millions users to be successful or important. It appears that Spotify is in a similar position now. My only hope is that the API does not degrade significantly.

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Which is how you end up in silly situations where Google or equivalent breaks, cuts or ignores some bug that affects millions of people with "it's just a rounding error". At some point, one must recognize its still millions and they remember that treatment.

I don't believe for a hot second Spotify has 600,000,000 legitimate users.

Well they speak of 236 million subscribers [1]. are they lying ?

[1] https://newsroom.spotify.com/company-info/

Well, they'd need to cite something that shows that every Spotify member shares their membership with 1.6 other people. I'm skeptical of that. It's bad enough with Netflix recommendations and profiles - Spotify doesn't support profiles, so you're sharing your music choices with those people? Spotify is also pretty aggressive with account sharing.

More likely free users with their own accounts. Subscribed users are a subset of all users and I wouldn’t be surprised if unsubscribed users were the larger group.

I've created 4 free accounts over the years but haven't spent a minute listening. I'm sure it's like facebook, once an account is created it's counted as a unique user forever.

That’s ok, but they confirmed they have around 250mil paid subscribers. I can easily imagine 350-400mil free ones on top of that, especially since they explicitly say they only count active users, not just the number of user accounts.

as in you believe there are illegitimate users? or what?

Bots? People who signed up but don't use? Lost password for account?

Of course. Their is an industry of botfarms listening to music.

602m monthly active users as of Q4 2023. That's in their investor deck and similar figures in their SEC reports. Around 250m premium subscribers, the rest on the free tier, accessing Spotify at least once per month.

https://s29.q4cdn.com/175625835/files/doc_financials/2023/q4...

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