The first issue has to do with the controversy dealing with Joe Rogan. Several artists have severed their ties with Spotify due to Rogan’s numerous actions. Most notably, he’s been accused of spreading misinformation about vaccines amid the Coronavirus pandemic. Because of this, the hashtag #cancelspotify sprouted up across the internet, and there were, undoubtedly, a lot of people who got rid of their subscriptions to the platform. Also, due to the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, Spotify pulled its service from the Russian people. That was predicted to amount to a 2 million subscriber loss for the company.
However, Spotify gained an additional 182 million subscribers in Q1 of 2022
Regardless of the ongoing struggles, Spotify has been enjoying a good boost in subscriptions. It gained 182 million additional subscriptions in the first three months of the year. Actually, Spotify was the 10th most downloaded app in Q1 2022 with more than 75 million downloads across Android and iOS. This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, as a lot of major brands thrive despite their controversies. Most of the time, if a company has a popular enough product, the mass majority of people will remain customers/users regardless of what the company does. This is why Meta still exists. Spotify is a big enough company that the millions of subscribers it lost pale in comparison to the new users coming to the platform. This could actually be thanks to its focus on podcasts over the last year. The company just released video podcasts to a wider audience. As time goes on, we expect to see more people hop onto Spotify as the company adds more features and refinements.
