Per Reuters

For the first time ever, Spotify has reached half a billion active monthly users for the first time ever. After the news of its increased active monthly user count, shares of the company increased by 5%.

To be specific, Spotify reached 515 active monthly users in the first quarter of the year, surpassing analysts' forecasts that the music streaming app would surpass 500 million active monthly users. It was reported that premium subscribers also saw a 15% increase.

The number of premium subscribers increased to 210 million paying users, which beat estimates of 206 million paying users. The current quarter's premium subscriber forecast expects it to grow to 217 million paying users.

Spotify has also shared its plans to reach a billion users by 2030. It also wants to reach annual revenue of $100 billion while promising high margins from one of its biggest investments.

The music streaming service's costly expense involved its expansion into audiobooks and podcasts. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek gave a statement regarding the company.

Daniel Ek: "Spotify is not sort of one silver bullet, but it's rather 100 or 1,000 things that we are doing that sort of compounds and adds to the story... There's still a kind of a lot of macro choppiness in Q1 so that impacts us a little bit,"

In other social media news, YouTube Shorts went from 30 billion to 50 billion daily views, competing with TikTok. In February, this comes as the company tries to compete with TikTok with its own vertical scroll-down videos.

At the start of the year, it was announced that on February 1, YouTube Shorts creators would be paid under the company's new terms. This comes as the streaming giant uploaded its YouTube Partner Program to allow creators that qualify to monetize their Shorts, with creators needing to accept the new terms by July 10, 2023.

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Reuters