Alex Morris (who writes the excellent newsletter The Science of Hitting) visualized Spotify’s monthly active user growth since 2016 by geographical region. It is interesting to see what has happened over a longer time period than a couple of quarters, as the longer time period give high growth rates the time to play out.
In 2016 Spotify was already 10 years old and a large consumer Internet service with more than a 100 million monthly active users. At the time, most Swede’s probably would have said that “everyone has Spotify”. That what obviously not true. Most notably the absence of users in Asia and Africa (a.k.a. Rest of World).
Since 2016 Spotify has more than doubled in North America, tripled in Europe, 5x:ed in Latin America and gone from a few million to almost 150 million monthly active users in Rest of the world (Asia, Africa).
A company with a great product in a big market that keeps on growing 30 % per year for many years can reach 500 million active users and still have a lot of possible growth ahead (YouTube has more than 2 billion monthly active users as a comparison.)
