[Presentation]
The first brilliant moments of a new golden age of audio. The best is yet to come. Hi, I'm Daniel Ek, the Founder and CEO of Spotify. Wherever you're watching from, wherever you are in the world, we're really glad you're joining us. Today, we want to show you what's next for Spotify and for audio. Before we talk about where it's all going, let me say a few words about where it all started. I spent my childhood in Rågsved, a short distance from here, and at night, I'd stare up in the ceiling in my room and I'd dream of faraway places. Someday, I'd hope I'd travel the world. Until that day, it was music that carried me there. Before I ever got to Britain, Led Zeppelin showed me around. Before I ever set foot in the United States, Bob Dylan gave me a tour.
With nothing but a pair of headphones, music took me places I'd never been. Something about sound still transfixes us all. The desire to create and connect through audio is foundational to the human experience. I don't believe it's a coincidence that the basic unit of music, the beat, echoes the human heartbeat. For Spotify, audio is our history and it's our future. In 2006, the music industry was collapsing. Piracy was killing it. The idea that all music should be free for the taking, no matter the cost and effort, destroyed the careers of a lot of working artists. We believed there had to be a better way, so we founded Spotify. We knew our platform had to be nothing short of revolutionary if we were going to stand a chance of getting people to abandon piracy and pay for music again.
Spotify would have to be faster, more responsive, and more personalized, and it would have to be more exciting and engaging way to listen to music. 15 years later, we are more committed than ever. We still believe in audio first. We still want to be the soundtrack to your life. If you're an artist or a podcaster with a song to share, an album to drop, or even a story to tell, we want Spotify to be the best place for you to find an audience. It is, because our platform is wired for connection. It's connecting listeners with the audio they love and connecting creators with the fans who'll find meaning in their art and who won't just follow their career, but will sustain it. These goals reinforce each other.
A more connected, more engaged community of listeners creates more demand and more opportunities for artists and podcasters to make a living from their work. The more people who are creating, the more there is for our users to discover. It's a virtuous cycle, a flywheel, and it's propelling Spotify and the audio industry forward. Over the past decade and a half, what we've seen and helped drive is an audio renaissance. I use that word intentionally. It really is a renaissance, and what it is not is a restoration. We're moving forward, not turning the clock back. People love to look back fondly on the music industry of two decades ago. The era of the record store and FM radio, a time before piracy. I understand the nostalgia. I get it.
As a kid, I remember spending hours at my local record store, flipping through the bins and selecting what albums to buy. Looking back, what really strikes me is how limiting it was. The amount of music you could discover back then was limited by shelf space and floor space, by the physical distribution capabilities of music companies, by the personal preferences of our radio DJ, and of course, by where you lived and how much you could afford to spend. There were also fewer possibilities for creators. The shelves and the airwaves could only support so many artists, and industry gatekeepers could only invest in so many artists. A lot of great music was put out in the 1970s 19 80s 19 90s, but unfortunately, many more never got a chance. Over the past two decades, streaming has fundamentally changed the audio ecosystem.
It's lowered barriers to entry. It democratized access to audio for listeners across the world. More creators are creating and succeeding than ever before. 20 years ago, the music industry was a pretty restrictive club. Unless you had the resources to produce a physical product and distribute it to record stores and get your song on the radio, it was difficult to break through. Case in point, back in 2002, just over 30,000 albums were released in the U.S. Only 8,000 sold more than 1,000 copies, representing 98% of sales of new releases. By comparison, in 2020, 1.8 million albums were released on Spotify in the U.S. 6x as many albums represented 98% of the streams for these releases. It's not just the possibility that more artists can be heard by a global audience, it is that more artists are being heard.
This means that meaningful income is flowing to more artists than ever before. When Spotify launched in Sweden in 2008, the combined market of physical and digital music sales amounted to about EUR 17 billion. Streaming represented EUR 300 million of that, or only 2% of the sales globally. At the industry's low point in 2014, the combined total dropped another EUR 3 billion to EUR 14 billion. With streaming, we've helped the global music industry go from contraction to growth. In 2019, the total revenue of the recording industry was just over EUR 20 billion, and more than half of that revenue, EUR 11.4 billion, came from streaming. Here's what that audio renaissance looks like from our front-row seats of Spotify.
Since 2008, Spotify has expanded from one market to 93, and from thousands of listeners to more than 345 million, and from paying out approximately half a million to creators in 2008, to paying out more than EUR 5 billion in 2020. Our platform has grown exponentially, and it's going to keep growing. We didn't want to confine our app to some walled garden to just a few devices. Our users have a nearly limitless choice of devices. To meet them where they were, we needed to be everywhere. Today, Spotify is available on more than 2,000 different devices, everything from smartphones to smart speakers and from car audio systems to gaming consoles. That spirit of innovation is stronger than ever. Three years ago, Spotify had three million creators on our platform.
Every year since, that number has increased from 4 million to 5 million to 8 million at the end of 2020. I believe that by 2025, we could have as many as 50 million creators on our platform, whose art is enjoyed by 1 billion users around the world. That's not a prediction or a goal. It's really both a challenge and a great opportunity. We're in the midst of an explosion of audio creation, the early innings of what we see as a truly global creative economy. In the coming years, as more and more people become audio creators, Spotify will enable the best of them, the ones that are highly driven, highly talented, and resonate with a group of fans to grow their audience and build their careers on our platform.
We want to be the place where educators and entrepreneurs and storytellers and authors, well-known personalities, and artists are all able to reach out and touch the world through audio. That brings me to Spotify's mission: to unlock the potential of human creativity by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off of their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it. That's been our aspiration, the point on the horizon that we're striving toward. Yeah, it's ambitious, but it's also essential. If the creative economy is going to thrive, we need to ensure that audio creation can be a profession and not just a side project. Today, we're going to show you how we're empowering the most talented creators in the world to turn their passion into a profession.
Before I pass the mic, I wanted to say a few words about the goal of bringing audio to the world. Spotify is currently available across nearly half of the world, but there are still millions of creators and billions of listeners who don't yet have access to Spotify. I'd like to share some news. Over the next few days, we'll be expanding Spotify's global footprint significantly. This move will make Spotify available to more than a billion people in new markets around the world, with nearly half of them already using the internet.
A little later, we'll tell you more about what that will mean, and when we do, I hope you'll remember it's just the beginning. Years from now, I believe we'll see this moment for what it really was, an overture, the first brilliant moments of a new golden age of audio. For creators, for listeners, for Spotify, for audio, the best is yet to come. To tell you more, I'm going to hand things over to Dawn Ostroff at the legendary Electric Lady Studios in New York City. First, let's make a quick stop in Colombia.
Hey, Spotify, this is your boy, J Balvin. This is my Spotify story. It's hard to say that I didn't dream about it since I was 12 or 14, just vibing and dropping and then I started freestyling in the streets, and then I started the freestyle battles. I had the dream. I started sharing this music that I have because I just love it. I think the youth in Colombia is going to start liking it, and I was like, "Wait, there's something going on with my music," checking my name on all these lists. Spotify started popping.
Radio wasn't playing reggaeton. I remember I went to the studio, like, "We have to make this happen. I want to be that guy." We made it, 6:00 A.M., "Ay Vamos" took reggaeton back into radio on the mainstream again. I love Spotify. It became an addiction to me to just check numbers every day. We went straight up to the one in Spanish. I was like, "Ha. I told you guys." Beyoncé jumped in the remix, and of course it worked really well. That gives us the respect from the industry and the world. I like it with Cardi B. It was showing that it wasn't luck. You know, it's so great when this is a huge moment for the culture, and I think this is just the beginning.
Dream big. Grateful. [Non-English content] I was in shock. It's beautiful to get those numbers that you're selling. Number one Spotify. I make music because it makes me happy, and I make people happy. Spotify just gives me the way to send a message that I want people to tell.
What an amazing story. My name is Dawn Ostroff, and I'm Spotify's Chief Content and Advertising Business Officer. It's a privilege to be speaking to you from New York's Electric Lady Studios. Helping artists and creators get discovered, grow their audience, and even create the content that fuels their ambitions is the foundation of what we do. Today, I'm excited to share some of those details, and even a little bit of news. Let's begin on the music side. This is where we tap into powerful algorithms and leverage a global team of hundreds of experts, each of them a walking encyclopedia of music and cultural knowledge. They help us deliver an experience that reflects the world around us and transcends traditional borders. This trend is evident in overall listening patterns, where we see that users are increasingly engaging with music from other countries.
On Spotify, artists from Latin trap to South African house or even classical find more than 80% of their streams outside of their home country. That's the power of trailblazing new routes in how music crosses borders. To tell you more about how all this works, I'm going to pass this off to Spotify's co-heads of music, Marian Dicus and Jeremy Erlich.
As part of the music team here at Spotify, we think we have the best jobs in the world. Spotify has set the standard for helping new artists get discovered and supporting established acts as they continue their creative journeys. Our dedication to this begins with playlisting.
The first song that I uploaded was "Location," and I actually uploaded it in May 2016 on Spotify. I was a senior in high school. I was shy. I didn't have an amount of confidence, and I didn't trust in myself. Four days after "Location" was put on Spotify, it got placed onto the Mellow Bars playlist. My monthly listeners went up. My streams went up. I'm hitting these numbers that I looked at and I'm like, "No way.
I went from 8,000 monthly listeners to half a million monthly listeners in a month. My dreams started to transition into the reality that I was living. Instantly, the amount of eyes that you have on you grow. By January 2017, "Location" had 24 million plays. Being the number one most-streamed artist on Spotify was astronomical. From being that low-key indie underground artist, this flower blossoming, I am blooming into this big orchard. Spotify is an amazing tool for an artist. The reach that it gives you, any one artist can release that one song that changes their life forever on Spotify.
I'll be living this dream with you.
How does playlisting work? Today, there are over 60,000 new tracks delivered to our platform every single day. Our playlist pitching tool lets artists and their teams provide valuable information about their music, and this information helps us make better decisions about where a song may find its ideal audience. Let's take, for example, Jenevieve, an up-and-coming R&B artist from Miami. In March, she submitted her new single, "Baby Powder," through Spotify for Artists. Our team listened to it, and they all loved it, so we featured the track on playlists like Bedroom Jams, Fresh Finds, and of course, New Music Friday. With only two singles out, she's already amassed 10 million streams, and Jenevieve is only one of thousands of artists we were proud to playlist for the very first time last year.
As we've grown, we've built and expanded an entire network of editors tasked with finding and elevating the best music from their countries and their local cultures. Last year, we added 76,000 artists to our playlist for the very first time. Combined with our personalized playlists like Release Radar and Discover Weekly, we're helping fans discover artists they've never heard before, 16 billion times a month.
Our commitment to discovery goes hand-in-hand with our commitment to new artists. They are the lifeblood of the music industry. They push boundaries and culture every single day, and we want to recognize the best of the best by giving them a megaphone, and that's why we launched RADAR, Spotify's global emerging artist program. Our first year saw us elevate 175 up-and-coming artists from around the world. We're giving these artists editorial and marketing support at a pivotal moment in their careers. We're showcasing their best work, producing content to introduce fans to their stories, and even recording new material with them through our Spotify Singles program. Without a doubt, many of the artists that took part in RADAR in 2020 will be household names that we hope to see headlining festivals and tours. 2020 was just the beginning.
When I was young, I did not dream about having a star life. I did not dream about the outfits, the makeup. I didn't dream about any of that. All I dreamed about was people listening to my music. The RADAR program did that for me. Spotify has always been very supportive of my career since the beginning, and they've always shown a lot of love. The RADAR program put me on the cover of a lot of different playlists. My face was on there, and it said the RADAR thing, which is pretty cool.
Actively reaching out to the independent people and putting them on playlists, it just means so much to their careers. To see my face on a lot of different billboards around L.A. It was so awesome having that billboard when my record dropped. I always believed I could make it happen. 23 million monthly listeners though, just sick. This is what an artist is always aiming for, reaching new people, how to touch more hearts.
Those artists are all going to be superstars, and you'll be able to say you heard them first right here on Spotify. In the music team, our mission is both to reflect and to amplify culture. Editorial and programming, that's only half the story. Spotify's magic is also about the marketing programs that we built with artists because those truly help them contextualize their art and connect with their fans.
At Spotify, we're in the business of helping artists tell their stories because we believe those creative expressions help bring the artist and music to life, and it gives the listener a deeper connection to the songs that they love. We have several tools to help them achieve that goal. About a year ago, we launched Enhanced Albums. It's a multimedia playlist experience that lets artists take their albums to the next level by including video and audio liners. Let's see how Blackpink used it.
Hi, this is Blackpink from South Korea. We released our Enhanced Album in 2020, and it was a really interesting opportunity for us because we got to become more personal with our fans. Instead of just listening to our music, our fans could get their hands on exclusive videos, story lines, and Canvases. I think it was a lot of fun for both us and our Blinks. The concept of the video was to depict two contrasting sides of our group, black and pink. It was a whole lot of fun being two different moods for the day. Many people use Spotify globally, so it helps us reach fans from around the world instantly, and we were so shocked because we never imagined to have so many people across different countries to listen to our music.
We were really excited to hear that Spotify is finally launching in Korea. We're glad that our Korean fans will gain access to a larger range of music and provide new artists to share their music to the world. We released our Enhanced Album in October 2020, and by the end of the year, we had over 1.7 billion streams from listeners in 92 countries.
Let's talk about Blackpink. They used our Enhanced Albums format to showcase their duality. Sophisticated, edgy, and dramatic on the one hand, youthful, fresh, and sweet on the other. Taylor Swift, always one to drop a surprise, planted Easter eggs for her diehard fans leading up to the release of Lover. Finally, Billie Eilish, who built the very first Spotify Enhanced album. She brought her fans deeper into her world with her debut, WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? The success of Enhanced Albums goes well beyond artistic expression. Not only do we want our listeners to discover new music, we also want to help artists connect with and grow their fan bases.
In a similar vein, we've been experimenting over the past few months with another new feature that will give many of our most popular artists a new way to connect with their fans, Spotify Clips. With Spotify Clips, artists can share intimate moments with their fans. Those can be videos from the recording studio or on the tour bus or even backstage, stories that are going to help bring their art to life. We've been testing this feature, and we cannot wait to roll it out to all of you. Of course, we can't talk about music without talking about the contribution of songwriters, producers, and the broader creative community. Simply put, without them, there would be no music. Last year, we gave fans easier access to credits for the creative teams behind their favorite tracks.
With the support of our publishing partners, we've added songwriter and producer credits to the platform. By surfacing these incredible talents, we are presenting listeners with more opportunities for discovery. If Ariana Grande's popularity can lead fans to discover her close collaborator and songwriter, Njomza's expansive body of work, we want to enable that connection. Digging into a songwriter's catalog should really be no different than exploring the albums of an artist you love. We're not stopping there. Just a few months ago, we unveiled a dedicated Songwriters Hub, allowing us to take songwriter discovery to a whole new level. Our Written By playlist is a new destination which showcases a songwriter's or producer's body of work. If you haven't spent time listening to the discography of Jeff Bhasker, Ali Tamposi, or Tayla Parx, you're really missing out.
Bottom line, great music deserves to be heard. For those listeners really passionate about audio quality, well, later this year, we'll be launching a new subscription offering, Spotify HiFi. To tell you more, I'd love to welcome two people who truly understand the art and the science of sound.
Our creative space, we like sunlight, good sound system, good bass. Big, giant, loud speakers. Like, very loud speakers. Very, very loud. Every time we go in with anyone else, we're like, "Turn it up, please. More. Louder. High-quality audio means just more info. There's just things you will not hear if you don't have a good sound system. It is really important just because we make music that wants to be heard the way that it was made.
We work on songs probably way longer than we would have to. There's a lot of layers to what we're working on. The amount of how important it is to us for other people to hear our music with a good sound system, can't even tell you. Just because there's so much detail.
I mean, the range of HiFi , from low to high, it's an expansion of actual frequencies that you're able to hear through your headphones or through speakers. When we make music, I think the way that the listener experiences it is the most important thing to us. The most. Wouldn't you say? Yep.
To me, it's in the details. There's so many little weird things that we buried in all our stuff. There's little times where Billie was chuckling in the background, or she'll do whisper layers of each line. Those are just things that anytime anyone really takes time to sit down with our music and listen to it in a really high-quality way, it's very exciting because I know they're hearing everything that we intended them to. You think that you are mine. I think that you might lie.
Supporting artists and their creative visions, giving them a space for artistic expression, connecting them to their fans all around the world. It's why we show up to work every single day. It's what we love to do. To talk more about the tools we provide artists, here's Charleton Lamb from Spotify's Marketplace team.
Hello from The Box, a legendary venue here in New York that's hosted many creators over the years. During the creative process, there's a spark that happens when you put the right tools in the right creator's hands. That's one of the core goals of the Marketplace team here at Spotify. We try to bring the studio to every artist, giving them everything that they need to create. A few years ago, we acquired a startup called Soundtrap, which puts the capabilities of a full professional recording studio in the cloud, giving artists and podcasters a simple but powerful way to collaborate like never before. With so many of us working from home this year, Soundtrap's collaborative capabilities have never been more crucial.
If you're a songwriter in North America, you can lay the groundwork for a track, kick it over to your producer halfway around the world in Asia, and finally finish it off in real-time together with Soundtrap's video and chat functionality. To make the offering even more powerful, this year Soundtrap also launched the Capture app, which enables songwriters to record musical ideas on the go and share them with their collaborators whenever inspiration strikes. Soundtrap is more than just a place to create. It's also a place to learn to create. Today, there are tens of thousands of teachers worldwide that trust Soundtrap to enhance existing programs as they educate the next generation of creators. In schools around the world, students are learning about music theory and how to create a podcast.
In other cases, educators are using Soundtrap to fill a void left by school programs that may have been cut. Spotify's SoundBetter is another powerful tool for creation and collaboration. It's a marketplace for connecting service seekers and providers in the music production industry globally. Musicians can hire the perfect producer, engineer, singer, drummer, even songwriter to help them fine-tune a song. If you're a music production professional yourself, SoundBetter can connect you with other creatives who are looking to hire. Together, Soundtrap and SoundBetter enable creators to form bonds and make music regardless of geography. While 2020 put a spotlight on remote work, artists were leveraging these tools long before social distancing even entered the cultural lexicon. Now, to tell you more about how we're using what we've learned creating the world's best music platform, I'd like to pass it back to Dawn.
Thanks, Charleton. At Spotify, we're committed to building the world's leading audio platform. Podcasting is a huge part of that commitment. Podcasting is more than a decade old. Where others saw the medium as an afterthought, we saw extraordinary creative and unrealized monetization opportunities. We knew that we could transform the podcast industry the way we did with music. When we set our sights on podcasting, we went all in. We dove into original content by acquiring Gimlet Studios, Parcast, and The Ringer. We made deals with the likes of President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama's Higher Ground Productions, Warner Bros. and DC Comics, and The Joe Rogan Experience, and most recently with Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. We also built a best-in-class podcast platform complemented by our acquisitions of Anchor and Megaphone.
Just three years ago, there were a few thousand podcasts on Spotify. Today, there are more than 2 million. Spotify is connecting the creators of shows like The Daily, NPR News Now, and Crime Junkie with more than 345 million users. We've seen our monthly consumption of podcasts on the platform increase 1,500% in just three years. Now, to tell you more about our global original podcast strategy, I'll pass this to our Head of Studios and Video, Courtney Holt, in Los Angeles, and in New York, Lydia Polgreen, the Managing Director of Gimlet.
Thanks, Dawn. Spotify Studios has been very, very busy. We're building a global infrastructure to support influential, diverse, and emerging voices. Today, we have podcasts across our entire footprint, and we've developed studio teams in 17 markets to work with local creators to make sure we're capturing regional culture. Authenticity and cultural relevance, that's what deepens the connection for audiences. The world's best creators are embracing Spotify as the key platform for podcasting. Let's hear from some of them.
I'm Magê Flores, and together with Maurício and Bruno, we host Café da Manhã, which is a partnership between Folha and Spotify. Café da Manhã is a daily podcast, and we cover culture, lifestyle, economics. We are proud to be a Spotify original podcast along with many other amazing international shows. Our own original Spotify podcast called Gee Thanks.
As a journalist, I believe in the power of a story to inspire, inform, and even spur action. In 2021, it's clear that podcasting is unrivaled for its ability to intimately connect. I'm here today representing the podcast studios of Spotify, Gimlet, Parcast, and The Ringer. We're incredibly proud to be in business with extraordinary creators. The Ringer is a pioneering force in sports and pop culture podcasting. Fans can't get enough of "The Fantasy Football Show," "Binge Mode," and "Higher Learning with Van and Rachel." Bill Simmons and the team at The Ringer cover it all. We're thrilled to have The Ringer on Spotify and excited to announce that we're taking it global. For Ringer fans outside the U.S., get ready. We're going to build on the success of Ringer FC with a slate of Ringer programming for markets across the world.
Since Max Cutler founded Parcast, he's established himself as a true innovator, pioneering a new form of scripted true crime storytelling. New local language adaptations of those shows, like "Serial Killers," are now being heard in markets around the world. We're focused on nonfiction storytelling rooted in journalism with shows like "Resistance," "Science Vs," and "Reply All," as well as a slew of new, deeply reported shows that upend the true crime genre. We're also growing our fiction podcasts, making more movies for your ears. A new season of our propulsive hit show, "Motherhacker," starring Carrie Coon, will be back in 2021. We have exciting projects in the works with some of the best-known creators in Hollywood.
At Gimlet, we've always stood for innovation in audio, so we're thrilled to have launched "The Get Up," a totally new kind of morning show that combines news, talk, and your personalized music. This kind of programming is only available thanks to Spotify's extraordinary technology. We're committed to making shows that people can't stop talking about, and we're constantly out there looking for that next big hit.
We're using podcasting to drive powerful conversations. That inspire, challenge, and educate. We created Archewell Audio to make sure that we can elevate voices that maybe aren't being heard and hear people's stories. The biggest part of this is trying to create this community of where you can share, would encourage everybody else to then share their own vulnerabilities within that safe space. The power of podcasting is not just in the conversations. It's in the community that we're building. I don't know that there's another medium that reflects the complexity of who we are as much as a podcast does.
What I love about the podcast medium is that it gives you a great opportunity to tell some of those stories that haven't been told before about Black culture, about Black people, about issues that are important to us. Indigenous women are facing a crisis in terms of the violence that we experience in our lifetimes, and podcasting has allowed me to really shine a light on that social justice issue and help people understand where that comes from. The stories are universal, and the guests are all Muslim. The ultimate goal is for people to feel something, for them to fall in love with the people that they're listening to without ever thinking about who they are and what they look like.
What I love about these conversations is that they're topics and issues that we're all dealing with no matter what's going on, whether that's a global pandemic or a nationwide reckoning with race. It took me a while to have the confidence to start giving my ideas and things I wanted to do. I started real small, and then when it's time to move and do it the way I wanted to do it, that's when I did. One of the things that defines artists is our curiosity, always wanting to learn more, reach further. This is a non-scripted project called "The LEAP Files." We analyze high-profile cases that have been in the news as it relates to police brutality against Black people. This podcast pulls back the curtain.
There are probably kids who are listening to podcasts in the cars of their parents that are now moving into their 20s, and that'll be the first wave of people that grew up with podcasting, and they'll be better at it than the generation was in 2008. I think that's going to be fun.
My name is Natalie Tulloch . I oversee Spotify's Sound Up program. Diversity has long been a weak point for podcasting. In order for this golden age of audio to truly shine, it has to include all of us. That's why we created Sound Up. Sound Up helps underrepresented podcasters boost their platforms and build their own shows. In the face of tremendous barriers, Sound Up graduates have gone on to launch beloved shows like "Dope Labs with Titi and Zakiya," which is now in its third season. Sound Up is really doing an amazing thing to help push all of these stories and amplify these voices that normally would never get a microphone. We get to present and show up in our podcast as ourselves.
G'day, I'm Rowdie Walden, and this is "Search Engine Sex." It would not be the show it is without the Sound Up experience.
Today, we're announcing an expansion of Sound Up, growing our program from six to 14 countries, enabling us to support an additional 140-plus emerging creators this year alone. The bigger the Sound Up alumni group grows, I mean, the more powerful we become.
Spotify is also thrilled to be partnering with Warner Bros. to bring the DC Universe to life in audio. Here to tell you more is Writer, Director, and Producer, David S. Goyer, and comic book industry legend and the Chief Creative Officer of DC, Jim Lee.
Well, I've been fortunate to have had a hand in shaping how audiences see Batman, and now it's really fun to have a hand in shaping how audiences hear Batman. With "Batman Unburied," we're going to be doing a deep dive into Batman's unconscious mind, into his dream state. We are really leaning into playing around with the idea of surround sound. One of the particular members of the Batman's Rogues gallery is very creepy. The idea of that character literally leaning over the listener's shoulder and whispering things to them, I think is going to be particularly nightmarish.
When you think about Batman, he's a character, obviously, but the types of stories you can tell with that character are pretty broad. It allows David, I think, to explore sort of the suspense thriller side of Batman and do something different in a new format. We have a ton of other amazing characters. We are planning on doing a Catwoman, Katana podcast, Superman and Lois Lane, Wonder Woman, Riddler, Batgirl. There's so many amazing characters that we can explore. We're super excited for the future. This is a long-term partnership between Warner Bros., DC, and Spotify, and I think the fan base is just going to respond to this in an exciting way and embrace it as something new and novel and supplements all the other ways they take in the DC Universe.
I'm incredibly excited to push the boundaries of storytelling.
Thanks, David. Spotify is committed to creators and storytelling that span generations, the sagas that inspire families on a road trip or connect fans whose virtual communities are rooted in passion for a specific universe. That's why we're so proud to partner with iconic creators like the Russo brothers. Anthony and Joe Russo, and the team at AGBO, their entertainment company, are experts in overseeing and creating narrative universes. The Russos have directed blockbusters like "Captain America: Civil War" and both "Avengers," "Infinity War," and the record-breaking "Endgame." We're thrilled to welcome them to Spotify and announce today that we are partnering on a multi-year deal. From the biggest creators in the world to independent creators all around the globe, Spotify is here to support them at every step. As with music artists, we're in constant dialogue with podcast creators.
We learned that they wanted more ways for new audiences to discover their podcasts. They also told us that they wanted to explore content outside the boundaries of podcasts. We enabled creators to seamlessly weave together music and talk. Artists and creators like Camilo, Maggie Rogers, and Margo Price have taken advantage of this new format. Above all, they told us that podcasting had long lagged behind other digital content when it came to data for creators. We've built Spotify for Podcasters into a powerful mechanism for understanding their listeners and courting advertising and brand partners. These creators and many more use Anchor, the most powerful podcast creation and hosting platform available anywhere.
On that note, I'd like to hand you over to the head of our podcaster mission and co-founder of Anchor, Michael Mignano.
Thanks, Dawn. For too long, podcasting was a medium where extraordinary creators spent countless hours bogged down in a maze of programs, services, and equipment with little hope of finding a meaningful audience or building a sustainable revenue stream. With Anchor, we're putting creators in control and making it easier than ever to start their dream show. Anchor is an easy-to-use, powerful, free platform for audio storytelling. From the moment you hit record to the moment you publish, Anchor streamlines the recording and editing process. It does even more than that. Anchor lets creators track their show's performance so they know what's working and what's not. It provides opportunities for creators to monetize their content, no matter what size their audience.
Take Yasmin Shahmir. Yasmin is a U.K.-based DJ. Last year, she launched the "Trippin" podcast. She and her team, they share stories at the intersection of music, history, and culture. Anchor's got this feature called Record with Friends, which lets people record with anyone, anywhere in the world. Yasmin uses Record with Friends to interview creative people in Mexico City, in London, and in New York. In 2020, eight out of every 10 new podcasts on Spotify were created with Anchor. That's more than a million new shows launched in the past year, more than a million new creators who are now sharing their voices.
To tell you all about it, here's Sara Lerner from our Podcast Formats team.
Welcome back to Stockholm. I'm Sara Lerner, Spotify's head of strategy for podcast formats, and we are here at Baggpipe Studios. It is one of the most iconic and coolest recording studios in Sweden. Beyond just enabling podcast creators, we want to give everyone the ability to take their creativity even further and to make audio experiences that, quite frankly, have never before been possible. We're going to be giving creators new tools designed to make what we like to call the future formats of audio. These are going to open up new opportunities to break from traditional content formats and to create something truly innovative.
Let me give you an example. Last year, we brought music and talk shows to both Anchor and Spotify. These allow creators to curate songs from Spotify's music catalog directly into their storytelling. They also offer a dynamic new experience for our listeners, who are now able to discover and share new music that they find in each of these episodes. These tracks stream from our catalog as they would from anywhere else on the platform, which means that we pay standard streaming royalties for any artist whose music gets included. As Dawn mentioned before, the format has really been a success, especially with artists who have always wanted an avenue to talk about music, both their own, but also the music that inspires them every day.
We're going to be rolling out a number of new capabilities in both Anchor and on Spotify that are going to enable creators to iterate on audio itself as a medium. The first is available starting right now. To make audio creation even easier, today we're announcing an exciting new partnership with our friends at WordPress. This is going to enable new Anchor creators to quickly and easily turn their written content directly into podcasts. We think this is going to empower a whole new group of creators, people who have historically been more focused on the written word, to also get to share their voices on Spotify finally. In the coming months, Anchor is also going to enable more creators to add a video to their podcasts. Soon, creators large and small will finally have the power to combine both audio and visual storytelling all in one place.
Finally, we're also building tools for podcasters to make their content more interactive. Historically, podcasting has really been a bit of a one-way street, where creators have had very little insight into who their audience is or what they actually care about. Right now, Spotify is uniquely positioned to change this, because for the very first time, with both Spotify and Anchor, the creator and listener experiences are brought together inside a single ecosystem. This is a game-changing step for us. To start, we'll soon be giving more Anchor users early access to new interactivity features, things like polls and Q&As that creators will now be able to publish onto their podcast episodes. This is going to enable podcasters to get real-time communication from their listeners directly on Spotify.
Ultimately, with all of these future formats, we're going to be empowering creators to experiment with new and immersive experiences to better connect with their listeners. To tell you more about how Spotify is enabling these connections, here's our head of R&D, Gustav Söderström.
Thanks, Sara. My name is Gustav Söderström. I'm Spotify's Chief R&D Officer, and I head up product engineering, data, and design. We live in an age of content abundance. Today, our library contains more than 70 million tracks, 4.5 billion playlists, and more than 2 million podcasts made by over 8 million creators. Every 24 hours, some 50,000+ hours of content get uploaded to Spotify, and that's just in one day. To give you an idea, it would take a person five years to listen to what's uploaded in that single day. By 2025, we believe that we'll have some 50 million creators on our platform. Abundance. It's one of the best things about Spotify, an entire world of audio, all in one place. Abundance can overwhelm.
With an endless sea of content to explore and only limited time in a day, listeners today face a paradox of choice. In this world of abundance, connecting new creators and listeners at scale is hard. Over the years, we've developed some of the most powerful recommendation algorithms in the world for audio content, all working toward one simple but hard goal, delivering listeners the right content at the right time. Achieving this goal is all about personalization. There isn't just one Spotify experience. There are actually more like 345 million different Spotify experiences, one for each listener. Every day, half a trillion events, whether they're searches, listens, likes, and countless other actions, take place on Spotify, powering and guiding our machine learning system. This gives us the ability to drive discovery in a way that audio has never seen before.
For any song that we're recommending, our models explore millions of hypothetical possibilities to find the best one for that moment. It's often said that recommendation and machine learning systems cannot be creative, that machine learning really just looks in the rearview mirror on past data and draws a straight line into the future, giving you more of the same, that it will never surprise you and take an unexpected sharp left turn. That's probably a good thing when it comes to self-driving cars. There, you want machine learning systems to be boringly predictable. It's definitely not what you want out of a good recommendation system. We're building technology that guides the listeners out of their comfort zone towards new music and podcasts that retain them and make them happier over time, even if that would mean less listening in the moment.
Introducing existing creators to new users is only one of the challenges of building a recommendation system. The other big challenge is the opposite, to recommend new creators to existing listeners. If machine learning systems are based on looking at past data, what do you do when you don't have any data yet? Machine learning systems that have to wait for something to first become popular before it recommends it to someone are doomed to only follow culture instead of create it. A really good recommendation system also has to be able to explore new things. This is really hard for machines to do. Well, it turns out that we humans, with the trillions of physical neurons between our ears, are pretty awesome at this.
To guide the power of our machine learning system, to be able to make bets and educated guesses, to capture culture and leverage human intuition and expertise, we also rely on the intelligence of experts. This is an elite team of more than 100 playlist editors, expert curators with diverse backgrounds and experiences, each having a razor-sharp sense for what's up-and-coming in every niche of the music world. These experts, along with our users, quite literally teach our machine learning system. They create playlist experiences, what we call hypotheses, each with thousands of potential tracks that fit one of their intuitions for how people might want to consume music in different situations. Take, for example, songs to sing in the car. What goes on that playlist might be very intuitive to you and me, but it's actually very hard to capture in code. You can't just write a rule.
You need to show the system what that sounds like. Our editors bootstrap the system so that it can act even without lots of past listening data. We call this approach Algotorial. As a result, our recommendations reflect cultural trends as they're happening, elevate great content before it breaks, and introduce new opportunities for artist discovery. As you heard earlier, we're connecting listeners to an artist they've never heard before 16 billion times a month. This year, we're releasing features that will bring about a whole new generation of playlists made with you. We will add functionality that updates your playlists dynamically. They'll become living, breathing collections of music that are fresh and fit your tastes. We'll expand our family of made-for-you playlists so you have more options to choose from, tailored to your mood and interests. The first step is expanding our beloved Daily Mix franchise.
You'll find new mixes based on genres and even decades you've been loving lately that update every day and learn as you listen. These playlists will begin rolling out globally in the months ahead. Personalization goes far beyond just playlists. We're also investing heavily in developing the world's best recommendation algorithms to power connections between podcasters and listeners. Given our success with music recommendations, we challenge ourselves with the question: Can Spotify do for podcast discovery what it has done for music discovery? We absolutely think we can. We're building and scaling what we believe will be the world's best podcast discovery experience. It turns out that we can even predict what kinds of podcasts our listeners might enjoy based on their taste in music. We're also making it easier to find the content you want to listen to.
Features like podcast topic search will enable listeners to search for podcasts by theme and topic, where we use machine learning to understand the actual content of the episode instead of users having to guess at episode names. You'll be able to type something like 'cooking' into the Spotify search bar and find podcasts that fit that theme. This feature is currently being tested in the U.S. We plan to roll it out in more locations this year. All of this is two-sided. Every new personalized offering for listeners also introduces new opportunities for creators, more ways to get discovered by new fans, more ways to keep them coming back, more ways to differentiate their work.
To tell me more, here's Charlie Hellman in New York.
I'm Charlie Hellman, Spotify's head of Marketplace. Playlists are certainly one of the key ways that we help artists reach new listeners. Artists and their teams, they're the experts on their own fan base. They know best how to authentically connect with their listeners and develop them into fans. That's why, four years ago, we launched Spotify for Artists. We created this free platform to put real listener data directly in the hands of artists for the first time. Since then, Spotify for Artists has steadily expanded into a hub that houses a growing suite of tools and resources to help build a fan base, from providing new ways for artists to express themselves, to creating more chances to be discovered, to giving artists the ability to pitch their music for playlist consideration.
We continue to iterate based on artist feedback, building new ways to surface artists to new fans. Today, more than 1 million artists and their teams are using Spotify for Artists every month. That means artists representing nearly 85% of all the music streamed on Spotify are on the platform. This year, we'll be bringing new tools to Spotify for Artists. Take Canvas, the short, looping visuals that artists can add to each of their tracks on Spotify. Canvas started as a small idea to bring album art into the digital age. As we've started to roll it out, we've been blown away by the creativity that artists have brought to the format. Tycho crowdsourced his canvases from designers using a hashtag, and Sam Smith created an entire augmented reality experience.
When artists or listeners share a track with a Canvas to Instagram, the full-screen Canvas loops in the background of the story, linking back to the song on Spotify. Today, we're excited to announce that Canvas is now available to all artists through Spotify for Artists. Let's take a look at one of our favorite examples.
Can't remember half the time that I've been alive. Album artwork evolved into single artwork. Single artwork has evolved into the Canvas. Beautiful stranger, here you are. Doing Spotify's Canvas is a way of saying to the audience, "Hey, this is kind of what I had in mind to help you as a guide while you're listening." My fans know that I love art, I love to draw, I love to paint. I use it in almost every facet of my music career. Video platforms are so oversaturated, and sometimes you just want to give someone a little glimpse of a visual that says, "Here's a little push, but fill the rest in yourself with your own imagination." I used the Canvas feature for the first time on my album, Manic, which was really valuable to me. It's about having bipolar disorder.
It's obviously about feeling like there's two versions of me sometimes. Standing now. The Canvas gave me a way to share a digital sketchbook with the fans. As I have those epiphanies about the songs, I can go back and change them. That was the best choice for me in a Canvas, for an album that was supposed to be about how I felt. I don't need anyone. This is my favorite Canvas. This is the one for Clementine. I love it so much. A lot of my fans have gotten tattoos of the Canvas artwork, which I think is really cool. Something that another fan who's played those records to death, the same way that you have, could walk up to you on the street and go, "I know that. That's from Halsey's Spotify Canvas. I love your tattoo.
She's amazing. As the world of marketing and promotion has rapidly shifted, we recognize artists' hunger for new and better ways to promote their music. Last year, we introduced Marquee. Marquee lets artists and their teams sponsor music recommendations, giving them the power to alert listeners on Spotify, across both our free and Premium tiers, about their new release. Listeners who see a Marquee are twice as likely to save the music. That means Marquee drives more than just streams. Marquee can help grow an audience that will support an artist for years to come. There is no music marketing tool that drives results like these for artists. Soon, it'll be even easier for artist teams to make Marquee part of their release strategy.
We're proud to share that in the coming months, we'll launch a self-serve buying experience in Spotify for Artists, enabling teams to book campaigns as easily as they update their profile. It will start in the U.S. This summer, we'll expand Marquee outside of North America. The U.K., Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand will be the next to get access to this powerful marketing tool. We were the first and only streaming platform to offer tools like playlist pitching, Canvas, and Marquee. With these tools, we're putting the power to find, engage, and grow an audience into the hands of artists. We also want artists and labels to have the ability to understand their performance on Spotify and create strategies that can make a real impact on their careers. That's why we built Discovery Mode.
Spotify's algorithmic recommendations are so good at matching listeners with new content they'll love, and we're doing it on a scale the music industry hasn't seen before. With Discovery Mode, artist teams select music that they want to prioritize during times when Spotify is picking that next track up for listeners to hear. This is a new audience development tool that gives artist teams a say in our recommendations and helps find the next listeners that are most likely to enjoy their track. With Discovery Mode, labels get an opportunity to attract more attention for their artists while we maintain the quality listening experience that users have come to expect. We carefully test each track and only amplify it in places where the track is resonating with listeners. All of the participating labels have been able to find new listeners and grow audiences for artists on their roster.
During pilot testing, on average, Discovery Mode has helped these labels grow streams by 30%, resulting in higher royalty payments for artists they've opted into the tests. Independent label EMPIRE has been a growing force in hip-hop for years, and we're lucky to count them among the labels working with us to test Discovery Mode. For one of their rising artists, ODIE, Discovery Mode was able to maximize the impact of the new single he dropped this fall, helping to grow his audience by 69% and enabling him to grow his royalties by more than 75% compared to before Discovery Mode. We're making sure that Discovery Mode is accessible to labels of all sizes by requiring zero upfront budget to use the service. These tools are powerful, not just because of what they do, but because of the platform they're on.
As Spotify expands to reach new markets in 2021, we'll make Spotify for Artists available in 25 new languages. We're so excited about the momentum that's building in our marketplace business. We're seeing greater adoption of our tools by artists and labels of all sizes. There is so much opportunity to innovate ways for artists to create, grow their fan base, and monetize.
Spotify was founded because we wanted to ensure that creators were given the opportunity to get paid for their music. Today, more artists are earning more on Spotify than ever before, and it's plain to see when you look at the numbers. At Spotify, we aim to make the platform as free and fair as possible. And by that, I mean success should be determined only by the quality and popularity of the artist and their music, not by who you know. More artists than ever are enjoying success on Spotify. Let's talk numbers. 57,000 artists represent 90% of monthly streams on the platform. That number has quadrupled in just six years. This means that listeners are engaging with an increasingly diverse set of artists.
In fact, over the last four years, the number of recording artists whose catalogs generated more than EUR 1 million a year across recording and publishing is up over 82% to more than 800 artists. The number generating more than EUR 100,000 a year, that's up 79% to more than 7,500 artists. What we also know is there's a strong correlation between success on Spotify and other revenue sources. As we see streams grow, hopefully, artists also will see their touring, merch, and other incomes grow. Nearly 370,000 artists have featured concert tickets or merch on their Spotify profiles. Looking ahead, we're going to focus on powering that revenue stream too. Those are the numbers, but here are the stories.
Being an independent artist and having a song with over a billion streams, it's insane. I don't know what it is, but I got that feeling. Over a billion. This is nuts. My music blowing up on Spotify and Spotify support has changed my life forever. Any artist that's putting out music that people like have a shot. There's money being generated that I can reinvest back into creative direction, marketing, branding, all of it, touring. To be able to do that without having to sign to a major label, to be able to fund the operation internally as it's working is just so sick.
Spotify has offered an entirely new framework for artists. It's something that I'm internally grateful for. I would not have my job if I did this maybe even five years ago. I think it's crazy how fast and rapidly changing the music industry is. I can either do this by myself, or I can sign a record deal. It's a choice that I was not afforded when I first started making music. Streaming offers this way for artists to have an income that isn't completely reliant on playing shows constantly.
It's definitely been a way that a lot of artists are able to monetize their creativity. To be able to live off of my art, I think that in combination with just having a place that my music is so unbelievably accessible, it's just awesome.
We predict that by 2025, from streaming alone, the music industry will surpass the peak that it reached at the turn of the century. The music industry is growing again, and it's growing in large part because streaming is growing, and streaming is growing because Spotify is growing, bringing more and more revenue into the industry. Right now, much of that revenue is coming from subscriptions, but increasingly, as audiences around the world continue to migrate from linear to on-demand consumption, that revenue will also come from advertising. There has been an explosion of growth in digital advertising, and as we've also just outlined, there's been an explosion of growth in digital audio consumption. In the U.S., consumers are spending roughly the same amount of time listening to digital audio as they do watching digital video, which research shows is over nine hours per week.
We haven't yet seen the same growth in digital audio advertising. If you look at terrestrial and satellite radio alone, it's a $30 billion ad industry, and they don't have a fraction of the insights expected in modern advertising. Unfortunately, some of those same challenges have carried over into podcasting. Here's why. Because podcast consumption has been based on downloads. Advertisers are flying blind. They have no idea if their ad was actually heard. Spotify shifted podcasting from downloads to streaming, which unlocks that missing data. To build on that opportunity, we launched Streaming Ad Insertion, or SAI. SAI has quickly become one of our most in-demand advertising tools. It lets advertisers reach the right audiences without sacrificing the quality and intimacy that make podcast ads work. The best part is they can understand the impact of their ads like never before.
Our recent acquisition of Megaphone gives us the ability to scale SAI to publishers beyond our exclusive and original content. That means that third-party publishers on Megaphone are now able to tap into this powerful technology for the first time. This year, we'll begin to expand Streaming Ad Insertion to leading Anchor creators. Today, we're announcing the creation of the Spotify Audience Network, a first-of-its-kind podcast advertising marketplace where advertisers can buy across a network of original, exclusive, and independent podcasts. We'll leverage our state-of-the-art technology to give advertisers the ability to reach and target our audience of hundreds of millions at scale, both on and off Spotify. This will help podcast creators make more money. For creators, advertisers, and the audio industry, the Spotify Audience Network is a game changer.
Last but not least, we're making it easier than ever for advertisers to reach music and podcast audiences. In 2017, we launched Spotify Ads Studio, our self-serve ad platform. It's our fastest-growing buying channel. Advertisers of all sizes in 22 markets are taking advantage of its ease and simplicity to reach Spotify music listeners with audio and video ads. Today, I'm pleased to share that we're expanding Spotify Ads Studio to also include podcasts. We're starting with Spotify Originals and Exclusives, we'll extend this to third-party podcasts in the future. Spotify is bringing audio advertising into the modern age, we're doing it on a global scale.
Back to Michael.
Exciting stuff, Dawn. Becoming a more attractive platform for advertisers will strengthen Spotify's entire ecosystem. We want to help podcasters take full advantage, not only through advertising, but with the power to choose the best business model for themselves. In the next few months, we will be kicking off a limited beta in the U.S. via Anchor, giving creators the opportunity to publish paid podcast content on Spotify for their most dedicated fans. This will give podcasters a number of options to choose how they want to monetize their work. Beginning today, podcasters can sign up for a chance at early access to this new feature. All these new tools will bring us even closer to our long-term mission: to give a million creators the opportunity to live off their art.
To talk a bit more about that mission and what it means both for Spotify and for the world, I'd like to welcome Alex Norström, Spotify's Chief Premium Business Officer.
Thanks, Mike. Spotify was built on the belief that audio is an essential human experience. Creators everywhere deserve access to a world of listeners, and listeners everywhere deserve access to a world of audio. Everyone, no matter where they live, deserves access to the audio operating system that we're building here at Spotify. If Spotify is going to fit the needs of people and communities around the world, it needs to be tailored to those people and communities. Now, you're probably most familiar with our free and Premium subscription plans, but we offer a host of other unique subscription options. Take, for example, Spotify Kids. We launched Spotify Kids in 2019. It's a standalone app accessible through our family plan subscription that's designed for parents with young children.
Take Spotify Lite, a slimmed-down version of our full Spotify app that's designed to run quicker and take up less space, which is perfect for users with older phones or less reliable internet connections. The list just goes on. Last summer, we launched Spotify Duo for couples, and last fall, we launched Premium Mini, an even more affordable Spotify Premium plan designed for select users in India and Indonesia. Bottom line, our pricing and subscription offerings vary across regions to reflect local economic, social, and technological factors. All help fulfill our commitment to bring both the best audio content and the highest value to our subscribers, with much more to come. Innovating on our subscription offerings is only part of the story of how we're making Spotify more available.
Today, I'm proud to announce that we're making Spotify available in 36 new languages, including Romanian, Hindi, Swahili, and even more. That's more than 60 languages altogether in the Spotify universe, which means that more of our users will be able to experience Spotify in their native tongue. As we keep working to perfect our user experience, we'll continue to prioritize more localization efforts. If we're going to serve creators and listeners around the globe, making Spotify more available to users in markets we already cover is only part of the equation. We also need to expand into new markets. That brings me to the big announcement we previewed at the start of this event. Over the next few days, Spotify will be expanding into more than 80 new markets worldwide.
With these launches, we're on our way to turning on all of the key remaining markets where we don't have Spotify today. We're launching across Asia and Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, Latin America. Together, these markets represent more than a billion people, with nearly half of them already using the internet. Some of the places we're going, like Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nigeria, have the fastest-growing internet populations in the world. A new generation of creators and listeners is rising, carried by passion and creativity and empowered by big advances in technology. Take, for example, Africa. There's no place like it on the planet right now, and the music being created there is as exciting and diverse as the continent itself. On day one, we are rolling out an experience available on all platforms, served up with a local flair. The potential impact here is just massive. Take a look.
They call me Burna Boy, and I'm excited to announce to you that Spotify is now live in many more countries in Africa. Music has always been the defining thing we take away the most from cultures. It's kind of an identity card. As a kid, I had dreams of becoming a proper rock star. I didn't know what it meant, I just saw it on TV. If the younger generation sees that the older generation is doing something and is successful, then they're going to be interested in that thing, and they're going to probably come out and do it better than their elders. Africa's talent is abundant. We just need that backing there. Since I started launching stuff on the platform, Spotify has been riding with me.
It's something I really hold dear to my heart. If everyone in Africa had Spotify, then everyone could experience different music and different cultures. It's important because everyone deserves to have access to that. It's a good cycle, man. It can only grow from here. Everyone deserves Spotify.
Isn't that amazing? In an effort to make Spotify available as quickly as possible in as many places as possible, some markets will launch with a core library of content and features that will evolve over time. Once we're live, we'll learn fast. We will adjust our product decisions and investments as we go. We'll work with local creators and partners to expand our catalog and deliver a Spotify experience that meets the unique needs of that market. Through this expansion, we'll offer millions the opportunity to create, grow, discover, and build a career in audio. Sounds and stories that once remained local will now be able to reach a global audience.
Long-term, in these markets, we believe there could be more than 1 billion potential Spotify users. That growth, like all our growth so far, will be enabled by the ways that we tailor our platform to the needs of the people we serve. In the end, every market we expand into and every innovation we develop, every connection we facilitate, and really everything we do, we do for creators and their fans. Take a look.
Spotify broadening their territories gives artists a chance to be seen and to be heard. The momentum that it's going to give these artists is going to be huge. We were really excited to hear that Spotify is finally launching in Korea. The biggest thing Spotify provides us is reach. It helps us reach fans from around the world instantly. You guys are doing all the hard work to spread all of our music.
When we have more access and it is easier to connect cultures, everything goes better. The way people see the world, the way people can understand there are different cultures, there are religions. I always had the hope that my music could touch people, no matter what their language. I remember seeing Blessings uploaded on a big Spanish channel. Somehow it got there, and I'm pretty sure it was because of Spotify.
Can't wait for artists to see their impact reach other countries and other territories, and for them to have the same experience we've had. It's so important. Music is worldwide. There's so much talent that isn't heard all over the world, needs to be heard. Spotify reaching those new territories, it's beautiful. Not only because I think it's beautiful that my music is going to be able to be there, but for new talent, it's life-changing.
I'm going to discover one of those artists, I'm going to be extremely inspired, and then I'm going to hit them up, and then we're going to collaborate, and then we're going to make something.
When I was growing up, I had nobody, literally nobody to look up to. I didn't have access to inspiring people. Being exposed to different music culture inspires me. People who didn't know me in South America and Spain are now like, "Okay, what music is this? Why are they dancing like this? They're dancing like that, and it's marrying." Music makes people happy. More music makes people happier. I think people are going to be happy. I don't care about the borders. I've got to have you wherever it takes me.
As we've outlined today, the creative economy is exploding. If you look carefully, it's been the real driver of growth on the internet over the last several years. So far, that explosion has been largely taking shape across video, with companies of all sizes focused there and new ones entering the market all the time. They're in a fierce competition for the content, the talent, and the attention. I've never been someone to follow the crowd, so rather than focusing where everyone else is, we decided early to go all in on audio. Not only are we one of the only players in the space, but we also have a headstart of more than a decade, an advantage that's given us tremendous data and insights and experience, not to mention unrivaled size and scale.
As we've outlined today, the opportunity in audio is absolutely massive. It is so much larger than anyone can even imagine. For the first time ever, we have the technology to connect the world through audio to give people, no matter where they live, the chance to be hear and to be heard. Today, the world can create, perform, and experience together from anywhere. That world is not inevitable. It must be built track by track, market by market, show by show, feature by feature, and it's already happening. We've tried to answer a big but important question, what's next for Spotify and for audio? When it comes right down to it, what's next isn't a question for us at Spotify.
It really is a question for you, because in the end, the future of audio belongs to you, to all of you around the world with a song to sing or a story to tell. The audio system, as I've described it, is not a work of art. It's an opportunity to create art. It's an invitation, and I hope you'll take us up on that. To demonstrate the power of this medium, before we go, let me introduce you to a couple of more of the world's greatest storytellers.
Ladies and gentlemen, Bruce Springsteen and President Barack Obama.
My father was silent most of the time. He was not communicative. I grew up thinking my father was ashamed of his family. That was my entire picture of masculinity. Did you have to deal with that?
My father leaves when I'm two, and I don't meet him until I'm 10 years old when he comes to visit for a month. I had no way to connect to the guy. The guy, he's a stranger who's suddenly in our house. On the surface, Bruce and I don't have a lot in common. He's a white guy from a small town in Jersey. I'm a Black guy of mixed race, born in Hawaii. He's a rock & roll icon. I'm not as cool. I was trying to remember the first time we actually met. Probably was in 2008 during the campaign. You came, was it in Michigan or Ohio?
I have no recall. In our own ways, Bruce and I have been on parallel journeys, looking for a way to connect our own individual searches for meaning, truth, and community with the largest story of America. Over the course of a few days, all just a few miles from where he grew up, we talked. It made sense if you're going to be a rock and roll star, you're going to play the guitar.
Guitars were cheap. I could actually work a job, which I did. I saved up $18, bought a cheap guitar. I started to learn some Beatles stuff. I learned "Twist and Shout. Did your folks say anything? [Presentation]
What we discovered during these conversations was that we still share a fundamental belief in the American ideal, not as an act of nostalgia, but as a compass for the hard work that lies before us.
As you can tell, these two have lots more to say. I hope you've been listening. I know I will. Now, no show is complete without an encore. Let me welcome from Los Angeles, California, Justin Bieber.
Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us. I'm Bryan Goldberg, Head of Investor Relations at Spotify. I hope you were able to join our live-streamed event earlier today, Stream On. For those who weren't able to listen, the event is available for on-demand viewing on our investor relations website. Joining us today for the related Stream On investor discussion and Q&A will be Daniel Ek, our CEO, and Paul Vogel, our CFO. We'll start with opening comments from Daniel and Paul, and then open it up for Q&A. For those who are participating today via Zoom, please use the raise hand feature in Zoom to ask a question. Once you're selected, you can ask your question directly on the call, and please keep your video feed on.
Before we begin, let me quickly cover the safe harbor. During this call, we'll be making certain forward-looking statements, including projections or estimates about the future performance of the company. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could materially differ because of factors discussed on today's call, in our presentation, and in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
With that, I will turn it over to Daniel.
All right. Hi, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I really hope you enjoyed the event. Stream On is hopefully the start of a new tradition at Spotify, where we're sharing more transparently our direction for creators and consumers alike. Before we jump into the Q&A, I wanted to take a moment to share some extra context for investors. Everything at Spotify starts with our why, and that's our mission. To unlock the potential of human creativity by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off of their work and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it. This mission guides really everything that we're doing at Spotify. Can go to the next slide, please.
When you think about this mission and you think about the event that you just saw, I think there are four pillars that really stand out, and you should look at all the announcements that you saw today through those four pillars, create, grow, engage, and monetize. This maps perfectly into our mission as well. If you think about unlocking the potential of human creativity, it is really create. By giving 1 million creative artists, that's really growing, live off of their art is monetizing it, billions of fans is growing once again, and enjoy and be inspired by it is engage. Think about those four pillars and how it connects to the mission, and you'll start seeing the why. Can go to the next slide. This is kind of how we're thinking about Spotify.
Our platform of growth is those consumers and creators, and we are really the facilitators in the middle with the create, the grow, engage, and monetize pillars as the way to view all of our actions that we're taking as a company. On the consumer side, as a user enters, they generate data, and those data points generate more ability for us to personalize the service, which of course leads to better user experience, which brings more users. On the other side, with our creators, you start seeing that more users brings more earnings potential, which in turn brings more creators, which in turn brings more unique content on our platform. It's really two interlocking flywheels, and the way we interact with that is just facilitating more ways for creating, more ways to grow, more ways to engage, and more ways to monetize.
Can move to the next slide, please. We've really come a long way since our launch in 2008. We're at 345 million users, 155 million subscribers, 8 million creators, and almost EUR 8 billion in revenue. We're still only in the beginning of where I think we will go in the long run. I wanted to take a moment to really visualize what I think our opportunity looks like and sharing some more context how that informs you about the decisions we're taking as we're investing in our business and what that business ultimately will look like. Can move to the next slide, please. This data, by the way, comes from a number of sources, including the Goldman Sachs Research report, including Ovum report, IFPI, and others as well.
The very simple way of looking at this is obviously to imagine that Spotify today is in the music streaming business and in the podcast business. Today we're at, call it, around 40% market share in music streaming. In podcasting, we're in an early stage. We're about 25% growth, but we're growing very quickly and taking market share. Long term, I think you should expect us to be somewhere between that 1/3 to 40% market share as we think about this opportunity. The more important point is when you look at and zoom out and think about what this opportunity will look like in the next decade. You can go to the next slide, please.
Something becomes quite obvious then, and that is obviously, one, that this is a very, very fast-growing market, and that we have a lot of growth left in this opportunity. The second thing that I think you should notice and see is that radio is really going from a gigantic business to becoming a much smaller part. Both music streaming, podcasting, and paid audio is the main beneficiaries of that unbundling of radio. I think if we zoom in, specifically on that 2030 part, you can see a few different things. You can go to the next slide, please. You can see, one, that music streaming in itself is growing by about 3x from where it is today, and you see that paid audio and podcasting combined is about a EUR 55 billion revenue opportunity.
The combination of the markets that Spotify is in already today is about EUR 130 billion opportunity. That's the close markets that I think we have the right to win. Long term, as I mentioned, we want to be at least a third to 40% of market share in those businesses. I think we're incredibly well-positioned to play that role, and to take those markets as it is today. Another way to contextualize that and to think about it is that we have at least 5x to 7x growth left in just the businesses we are today. The obvious call-out here would be Live that we're not in today.
I think just to kind of short-circuit that, I think we'll play some sort of role, but I don't think it is as clear as the fact that we're the music leader in music streaming today, and I believe we'll be the leader in podcasting tomorrow as well. Those are the more obvious opportunities, but Live is obviously a very interesting opportunity for us as well. The question is then, what kind of business does that lead to long term for us?
With that, I wanted to hand it over to Paul to explain a little bit more about the details.
Great. Thanks, Daniel. If you could turn to the next slide. Just thinking about some of the long-term guidance we've given in the past and sort of updating some of those targets. For us, we really are about sort of winning the audio space, both growing users and subs and subscribers and being able to monetize them at a high rate, both through subscription revenue, through some of these add-on services, as well as advertising. When you think about the long-term, we're optimistic, and our goal is to continue to grow revenue at +20% over that long-term period of time. We want to do it, obviously, in a way that increasingly growing our gross margins. We've talked about a number of ways this will happen. It will definitely take some time.
Our goal now is sort of 30% to 40% gross margin led by a number of the initiatives and a number of the things that you heard and saw in the Stream On event. That's sort of the targets we are a little bit more precision around. I think that target from what we gave at the Investor Day. From an operating margin perspective, I think, our goal is +10% . I think that will potentially modulate up or down, depending on when we have some investment, and when we're in investment modes and longer term when we're not. In general, we think +10% is a pretty good target. When we think about sort of modulating between revenue growth and gross margin and operating margin, some of it all plays together, right?
To the extent we get to obviously a higher gross margin, we could have higher operating margins. I also think when you think about the operating margin, you think about the three components there. I think you can expect us to continue to invest aggressively in R&D. That's kind of been between 10%, 11% for the last couple of years in terms of a percentage of revenue. I think if we continue to grow the business and gross margin expands, you could actually see R&D actually even increase as a percentage of revenue. We think that's really what's differentiated us and our product over time, and that shouldn't be anything new from what we've talked about in the past.
When you think about sales and marketing and G&A, we definitely expect that we'll get leverage on both of those over time, which would significantly improve our operating margin. We have been free cash flow for the last couple of years, and we continue to forecast that we'll continue to be free cash flow on an ongoing basis. Next slide, please. Just quickly wanted to sort of reiterate the guidance we provided, because I figured we'd get some questions on this. No change to Q1 or full-year guidance. We get the question all the time about what was expected in our guidance. Obviously, we've been working on the Stream On event for a while, so what was in the event was contemplated. A number of the things that we talked about at Stream On will take some time to roll out throughout the year.
Obviously, there's still a lot of uncertainty with how quickly or not some of those things get rolled out, how quickly the new market launches take off, as an example. We're kind of reiterating the guidance that we gave you. Just in terms of Q1, in particular, since we are about three weeks removed from reporting earnings, again, we feel really good about the guidance we gave and feel like we should hit the targeted ranges that we put out there. I would just say with one caveat, as most of you are well aware at this point, when our stock price moves up relative to where we forecast at the beginning of the year, we do have outsized impact on non-cash social charges.
Given the performance of the stock price so far in Q1, we will expect to have a significant increase in social charges if we were to end the quarter with the stock price where it is right now. Again, in terms of all of our major KPIs, MAU subscribers and revenue and gross margin will be within the ranges we provided, and the operating loss will be towards the low end, so towards the higher loss given the impact of social charges. Next slide. We quickly just wanted to kind of highlight some of the big takeaways from Stream On at this point. We hope that most of you were able to see the event and watch it. Obviously, there was a number of announcements we made.
Just to highlight a couple, new market expansion is one that we were definitely focused on. 85 new markets. We'll now be in 178 markets. Really being able to bring audio globally, which as Daniel mentioned in our mission statement, is being able to have 1 million artists live off their art and connecting it to 1 billion+ users. This sort of furthers that. HiFi, which is our CD-quality lossless audio, which will be coming out later this year. A number of features on the podcasting side, the advertising side and the marketplace side. Obviously, a number of announcements on the content side and creator tools, and we feel really excited about all the announcements we made.
With that, I think that was the last slide. Next slide. With that, I will turn it back over to Bryan to call on some folks to ask some questions.
Great. Thanks, Paul. Again, for those participating on Zoom, please use the raise hand feature to ask a question. Once you're called on, you'll be prompted to unmute your line, and then you can ask your question. I'd just like to remind you to please limit yourself to one question and keep your video feed on, please. Our first question today is going to come from the line of Ben Swinburne. I'm just going to unmute his line. Okay, Ben, I think you're unmuted.
Can you hear me?
Yep.
Great. Hey, everybody. Okay, I'll follow the rules and go with one. Daniel, if you think about that flywheel you just showed us, I think it's create, engage, monetize. I might be missing one of the pieces of the wheel. Where are we on Marketplace and Advertising specifically? You guys had a lot announced today. As we digest it and think about those parts of the flywheel, can you just give us a sense for where you think you are from an evolution and opportunity point of view? Obviously, those are two pretty big parts of the whole Spotify story.
I think they are really two different maturity stages as well as businesses grow. Marketplace, much earlier, but growing very fast just as a business. As we announced today, we are seeing tremendous pickup from labels and artist teams in just the utilization of the feature and even the results that they are seeing. I am, in particular, very pleased to see that not only are people seeing great response, but they are seeing that it translates into better revenue growth, which is a sort of telltale sign, I think, for even more further adoption. It is early days, but very strong signals, and you will see us launch these products more widely into the marketplace in 2021. Advertising is still relative to subscription, obviously a smaller business, but it is a more larger growth business for us.
There, in particular, as you've seen throughout the year, very excited about podcasting's impact on that. Even the announcement today on SAI, I think, will mean that we'll have more inventory. If you looked at, in particular in the U.S. and U.K., we were mostly inventory constrained in Q4. Hopefully announcements like this means that we'll open up more inventory, which means further growth in advertising as well. Two different businesses, two different stages, but very excited about both of them. Overall, one should lead to. Marketplace should mean better gross margins. Advertising should mean more top-line growth, and depending on the inventory, also better gross margins.
I would just add, Ben, just as an update on Marketplace, I think we'd given some guidance in terms of numbers for 2019 and said that we had expected Marketplace's contribution to grow at least 50% in 2020. Just to update that number, we grew better than that in 2020, so we feel good about the Marketplace expansion in terms of the benefit to gross profit in 2020. We do expect a significant growth in Marketplace contribution to gross profit in 2021 as well. Just to reiterate what Daniel said, if you remember back to Q4, we talked about the strength in the podcast business and that we were inventory constrained and that really we could have grown even faster.
We think with Anchor and with Megaphone and with being able to add SAI into both of those platforms and with all the increased ad inventory, I think we feel really good about being able to grow that business.
Thank you.
All right. Thanks, Ben. Our next question is going to come from the line of Rich Greenfield of LightShed Partners. Rich, your line is unmuted.
I think I'm unmuted. Okay, perfect.
Yep.
Kind of a two-part question. The first one is Apple is clearly doing subscriptions to take on exactly what Patreon and OnlyFans and sort of allow creators broadly to monetize transactionally. I think both Daniel and Paul, you talked about this a lot on the conference call about three pillars of monetization. I guess to the extent that Apple does subscriptions for podcasters or ways to transactionally subscribe to podcasters, does that make it harder to move people? The dominant platform for podcasting is Apple Podcasts. How does this make it more challenging to move over, and is that why you're launching this product, or was that always on the roadmap? Just because everyone's thinking about it, could you just give us your view on Clubhouse and sort of where that part of live audio fits into the Spotify world?
Yeah. It's always been a part of our roadmap to try to support creators in more ways to monetize and expand on their ability. By the way, I love your T-shirt, Rich. I didn't notice it until now. That's an old school Spotify T-shirt. The way to think about it is really streaming in the early inception, was we had to make the proposition very simple for all the actors. It was a one size fits all. We knew as the marketplace would get to maturity, that part of the strength of the business and the platform would be to enable many more ways to allow creators to grow their audience, engage with their fans, and monetize their fans. That is the multitude of ad-supported subscription and à la carte. It's always been on the roadmap to support some sort of transactional model.
Obviously, we've been looking at the success of paywalls out there and seeing the rise of creators on a lot of these platforms that you mentioned, too. It's in response to that, and I think you're going to notice that we're very focused and attuned to what creators want, and helping serving them in more ways. It's definitely part of that, not so much competitively. On Clubhouse, my fundamental view is Clubhouse is really two things. I think it's a creative format, and it's super engaging for creators. Very interesting with the interactivity. We obviously pay a lot of attention to all social and interactive features. The second part is the listening part as well. Long term, I believe the major trend on the internet isn't linear and live programming, but it's still time shifted and on-demand.
To that extent, I feel very good about where we're placed. Obviously, to the extent that creators find interesting ways to interact with their audience, that's definitely something that we're paying a lot of attention to and looking at and experimenting with as well.
Just to clarify, when you say that you're going to do subscriptions or paid subscriptions for podcasters, is that something that will eventually this year come to musicians as well?
No. You should think about it as the three pillars of our business model would be ad-supported subscription and à la carte. There's no sort of specific announcement on whether we'll have a subscription-only service of some kind. Paywalls is an à la carte model that we're committing to doing.
All right. Thanks, Rich. Our next question is going to come from Jessica Reif Ehrlich from Bank of America Securities. Jessica, your line should be open.
Yes. I think I'm open. Thank you. I guess continuing on those lines of questioning you've had so far. You just had such a wealth of information today. Just could you talk a little bit more about Discovery Mode, how scalable is that service on your platform, and how you think the economics of music content evolve over time? On the advertising front, do you feel like you're at an inflection point? What can the Spotify Audience Network do now that you own Megaphone, what can you do now that you couldn't really do before, and how big is that opportunity?
Paul, do you want to take this one?
Yeah. I think on the advertising side, I think it's a couple of things. One is I think it's bringing the innovation and the technology into the ad platform. Having things like SAI and being able to marry that with what we've already done and then combine that with bringing it to Anchor creators and Megaphone publishers is really compelling. Being able to have a more targeted, a more unique advertising spot within that ecosystem, is, I think, really exciting. I think we know that there's demand there. I think when you sort of marry the growth we have in content and content consumption, with increased inventory, we'll be able to do a couple of things.
One is, obviously, free creators will be able to, I think, help them monetize at higher rates because we're going to give them a better audience, we're going to be able to sell their audience to a wider group of advertisers. For us, it's actually better for the advertisers as well because they're actually going to be able to reach a wider network of consumers through having more content and more inventory. We feel really good about it from that standpoint. Jessica, the first part of your question was?
Oh, it was just on Discovery Mode.
Discovery Mode. Yeah. Look, we think it's a really exciting opportunity. We think the initial trends are really powerful. What's great about it is there's really no upfront cost to someone to participate in Discovery Mode. Again, if it works for them and if we're able to sort of find spots within autoplay or radio that actually work, they're going to get more streams, they're actually going to make more money. It'll obviously be at a promotional royalty rate, it'll benefit us as well. If it's something that doesn't work or, quite frankly, the music doesn't respond or relate, it won't impact anybody. We think there's a huge opportunity for artists to use it to amplify what they want to do in terms of getting their music and their creative heard.
It's a way to do it for them that's sort of risk-free at first because there's no upfront commitment to them.
Just want to reiterate and add, the number one question I hear from artists is, "How can I be heard more?" The number one question I hear from consumers is, "How can I discover more great content?" This kind of double-sided coin is really the strength it's playing to. When you look at labels in particular, their number one cost today is figuring out how to market their artists, and it's very expensive. Long term, I think you should view this as just creating a much more efficient ways for creators and consumers to meet. That's the opportunity. If we can make that efficiently, we can save money for labels and artists alike, and obviously participate in some shape or form for facilitating those relationships.
All right. Thanks, Jessica. Our next question is going to come from Heath Terry of Goldman Sachs. Heath, your line's open.
Heath, we can't hear you. Sorry.
All right.
Why don't we go to someone else, Bryan. We can come back to Heath.
We will come back. Let's go to Matt Thornton of Truist Securities. One second here. All right, Matt, your line is open.
Great. Can you hear me okay?
Yes.
Yep.
Great. Hey, good afternoon, guys. Thanks for doing this. It's very helpful. Maybe a bigger picture question and then a housekeeping question. I guess, first off, when you think longer term, I think you went out to 2030 in the slide deck, how do you think about the mix of subscription versus advertising at that point? Is it something like 80/20? Any color as to how you're thinking about mix longer term. I remember several years ago, I think it was Barry that talked about advertising as something like 20%, but that was really before the big push under podcast. I'm just curious any update there. Just a housekeeping question.
Obviously, given the rollout of new markets here, which is probably a little more aggressive than any of us expected this year, can you just maybe talk to what the impact is of minimum guarantees in that gross margin guidance you gave for the whole year? Thanks, guys.
All right. I'll take the first part of the question. Perhaps, Paul, you can take the latter part of the questions here. I think the answer long term is that we expect to be a major player in all three types of monetization. Both subscription, advertising, and a la carte transactions as well. I think all of them are going to play a role. Today, we like to believe that these Internet companies are only one thing. I think the future media companies are actually going to have a combination of different business models. It's hard to imagine exactly what it will be. Today, it's 90% subscription, 10% are the advertising. I know it's definitely not going to be the case. Advertising will be a bigger portion than that.
If you look at the closest comparison, we've talked for quite some time that we're actively competing against radio in those hours. You're talking about a market there that only advertising in itself is, call it EUR 50 billion-EUR 70 billion in revenue, mostly supported by advertising. If you think about that and you think about the EUR 130 billion TAM that we talked about in 2030, it's clear that advertising can be somewhere between 20%-40% of our revenue mix going forward. I don't know exactly where it will end up. I think a large part of that will be the more transactional part of that as well, so the a la carte part, which is kind of the unknown, because that's the unique thing on the Internet that you can't model on past businesses.
Just to the second part of the question. I'm not giving any specifics from there. Just in terms of reiterating our philosophy around guidance, we always include in our guidance anything we know we're going to do, whether or not we've announced it or not. We've been working on the Stream On event for a while now. You can assume that the things that were in the Stream On event were contemplated when we gave you our Q1 and 2021 guidance.
Thanks, Matt. I think Heath Terry's mic is working now. Let's try him again.
Yeah. Is this working? Excellent. All right. Thank you. Just to the extent that you've got a pretty wide range there on the gross margin targets, can you give us a sense of sort of what variables put you at the top end of that versus the bottom end of that? Then, just on the Spotify Audience Network, can you give us a sense of what kind of traction you're expecting out of that with non-exclusive podcast partners, just in terms of what's going to drive them to work with Spotify versus whatever existing option they have for advertising?
Yeah. I think if you look at the gross margin, there's a number of factors that are going to impact the long-term gross margin. We've talked about advertising growth and podcasting growth. We've talked about Marketplace. We've talked about some of the a la carte items. There's a number of things, I think, for us, a lot of it will depend on sort of the mix moving forward and exactly how that nets out, how many of these things grow and to what extent. I think we obviously have built a model where there's a decent amount of variability or optionality in those long-term forecasts. I think we feel very comfortable at the low end of that range.
I think in order to get to the mid to higher end of the range, we'll have to see how some of these things break and how big some of them go over time. That's kind of where the range comes from. As you saw, there's a number of initiatives we have, both for creators and consumers and market launches and product, that will all impact the gross margin in different ways. That doesn't even speak to how any other relationships on the music side may evolve over time. I think that's how I would think about the optionality on the gross margin side. Then the second part of your question, Heath, was?
Spotify Audience Network, what's going to drive sort of new partners into that, as far as it being the best option for them?
Yeah, I'll take the first stab and then if Daniel has any comments on that. I think a lot of it's about bringing innovation and bringing actually a focus on this that just hasn't existed in the past, right? When you think about SAI in particular, it's a product that nobody else is really offering anything like it. We know, and I think I spoke about this when we first launched it, that the minute we launched it, the amount of demand that we were getting from people who wanted to participate in it, or publishers who wanted to participate in it when we were only offering that type of an opportunity for our owned and exclusive content. We knew there's a huge opportunity to grow it.
By actually having more inventory, by being able to showcase more inventory to more creators and more publishers, then being able to do it in a way that's actually going to help them monetize at higher rates, we think will all be really great. Then, not to overuse a word, but it's another flywheel that will exist where, to Daniel's point, you bring more people, you have more creators, they monetize higher, it's going to bring more creators because they're monetizing better, and then there's going to be more content, so there's going to be more users that keep coming and on and on. I think that's how we feel about the opportunity.
Just the two things that I would add is, on the one end, we've seen this movie before. When we add more transparency and more ability to target, you start seeing more advertisers flock on to this, which obviously leads to a better experience both for consumers and publishers and advertisers all alike. The second part is, if you think about it from the vantage point of monetization and podcasting today, it's pretty arcane the way it works. If you're a large podcaster, you may have your own sales force selling it, or you may partner with a Megaphone that's doing it, and you're selling on the back of your brand today. For many podcasters, that's just not the opportunity.
You're pretty much going from no revenue at all until you can afford having your own sales force where you're making a lot of revenue. I think there are tons of podcasters out there that will welcome the opportunity of getting fair monetization for the unique audience that they bring to the market. This is a perfect product for them.
Great. Thank you both.
All right. Thanks, Heath. Our next question is going to come from Doug Anmuth from J.P. Morgan.
Great. Thanks. Just hoping you could talk a little bit more about the live opportunity. Daniel, you talked about the $28 billion going to $40 billion over the next several years. Just curious how you think that TAM grows, and then what will Spotify's role be in that process over time?
Yeah, sure. First and foremost, these were not my numbers. Just bear in mind, these were, I think, Goldman Sachs numbers. I think there's two parts of the live market. One is the offline event market that we all know. It's the Live Nation, AEG of the world, et cetera. There's the online live event market, which is a much earlier and more nascent marketplace. I'm pretty certain that we'll play some role in the latter, and to the extent that we'll play some in the former. We're already today having lots of artists, about 300,000 artists that are putting concert tickets up and promoting them via our service. The number one thing that they're asking us to do is to help them go even further and help them sell tickets and merchandise, et cetera. It is an opportunity that we're looking into.
I will admit, I don't have the same amount of visibility or comfort where I can say to all of you that I'm confident that we'll be a major player in that space. It's something that we're experimenting in, and I think we'll play a role in it. It's too early to say how meaningful that role will be. I feel very confident, on the other hand, that we will be the leader in music streaming and in podcast and the sort of future of online audio. I feel also very confident about the position we're in and how quickly we're growing in that too. It's way more experimental, but it's a very interesting space for us as well, and lots of partnership opportunity and somewhere I think we can be a principal as well.
Great. Thank you.
All right. Our next question is going to come from Brian Russo at Credit Suisse.
Hey, guys. Can you hear me?
Yep.
Yep.
Yep. I'll keep it to one. This is a question for both Daniel and Paul. I realize no one really knows the answer to this question, but what do you think happens to the music subscription business when concerts return to normal and artists presumably release a good amount of new music to go along with it?
I'll give my take and maybe, Paul, you want to augment that. I think every single time what we've seen is that when we see major new artist releases, we see growth rate ticking up. Obviously to the extent that we would see a lot of new releases, that's very helpful to Spotify. I think that's different, though, from what may or may not happen in the live business, which frankly, I think part of the reason why in the earnings call, I was more hesitant on the outlook in the short term is just we saw a massive shift as lockdowns started occurring. What we don't know is obviously to the impact it will have on consumption in the short term as people are starting to be more out and about in the streets.
I do think it will be a pretty meaningful difference in consumption patterns going from the export devices back to mobile and in car as one. If COVID is any indication, we won't be materially impacted by it, but it will change. That's part of the mix, I think, in the short term. In the long term, it's probably not going to matter all too much anyway because we're in just such a big tailwind of online audio growing massively.
Yeah, I would just echo what Daniel said. I think listening will change behavior, it will change habits. We saw it during COVID, and I think what's been really great at Spotify is our ability to sort of see those trends as they're happening before everybody else and make sure we're adapting our product and our offering and our thoughtfulness around it.
Got you. Thank you both.
All right. Thanks, Brian. Our next question is going to come from John Egbert.
Great. Thank you. The HiFi subscriptions are like the music to the ears of a bunch of aficionados that have been waiting for it and have loved your platform but would have had to go elsewhere for that level of quality. I am just curious, as you think further out about subscription tiers, maybe over multiple years, are there more opportunities to go up market? A lot of the tiers over the last few years have been more users for a lower average price point per user.
I think HiFi is the first one that will probably go up and then kind of connected to that, is there an opportunity to build something for super fans where you get enough scale, you could actually subsidize some special performances for smaller groups that pay for a higher tier subscription to entice them to pay up or have concert tickets that are limited release? How do you think about that over a longer term period?
Hey, John. Yeah, that's music to my ears. All of those are very much things that we're discussing sort of internally. I think the most important thing is just to contextualize this. I think as we try to get people used to streaming in the first place, remember, it wasn't too long ago as people started even questioning the concept of streaming versus owning their music. The mantra then was like, "I need to own my music. Why should I even do streaming?" The way you counter that is having a very simple proposition, and it needed to be very easy for people to try streaming. Then we knew eventually that the second that they would start engaging more with the product, their willingness to pay would increase massively.
I think we're now moving into this second sort of major phase of streaming, where you're moving from a one size fits all to a way more individual and tailored approach of monetization. That's true both on the creator side as it is on the consumer side. As you rightly pointed out, HiFi is now at that point where you're starting to see an evolution. It's also important that this isn't strictly some sort of business model exercise that we're running. The tailwind behind that is, if you look at the last two or three years, how audio quality is now mattering a lot more to consumers. We have these AirPods now that people are spending EUR 300, EUR 400, EUR 500. You have new headphones from Apple that's EUR 600, EUR 700. People are investing a lot more in just better sound. That's amazing.
We think that there's a unique moment in time now where we can enable that. I think you're right. I think we're in the early days of going from that one size fits all to trying to find more ways. As our audience grows into the 0.5 billion and then upwards to 1 billion, there will be lots of different segments that we can monetize. That's the beautiful thing with the Internet, is that you don't have to have just one proposition under one brand. We can tailor it and have unique proposition for each segment to drive up maximum amount of monetization. Even thinking about paywall, this is a massive opportunity as well, where you may see individual pieces of content be at a premium to even the normal standard Spotify subscription that it is today.
Great. Thanks.
All right. Thanks, John. We're going to go to the next question at Justin Patterson. Excuse me, Justin Patterson at KeyBanc.
Great. Thank you. Daniel, you spoke earlier today about the creator opportunity expanding to 50 million+ in the next few years. How should we think about where this growth is coming from both a geographic standpoint and then even the types of creators coming on board? Related to that, how should we think about that changing the way in which people engage on Spotify over time? Thanks so much.
Yeah. It's just been fascinating to see the amount of creators that's been growing in the last few years, and it's growing incredibly fast. As you mentioned, there's many sources of that growth. One is the geographic expansion. For me personally, I think as excited as I am about the growth of all these new markets and all the consumers we can reach, I'm equally excited about the new creators that we'll be able to reach because of that. One important point to highlight on is that 80% of our creators have audiences in other countries than where they are today. If you think back 20 years ago, that just wouldn't have happened. We're seeing more internationalization of our audience, and you're seeing reggaeton as a LatAm phenomenon now breaking out globally as well. There's massive amounts.
I think the number of creators, as you mentioned, also are broadening. You don't have to look even further than our WordPress partnership today to see that's going to bring a new source of growth to us as well, where we're basically making it frictionless for all of those that are bloggers who now with one click can make a podcast. I don't know what that will mean ultimately in terms of just the breadth of content that we'll have, but I suspect there will be quite a material growth given that WordPress I think currently covers about 20% of all the internet traffic at current state. We're going to see a whole breadth of new creators experimenting with our platform.
I think, again, with the types of machine learning focus that we're having and personalization, that leads to entirely new experiences that consumers can enjoy in more moments of their life. All in all, we think it leads to more engagement, which leads to more monetization.
All right. Thanks, Justin. Our next question is going to come from Mark Z . Apologies, Mark, I still can't pronounce your last name. Mark Z at Rosenblatt Securities.
No worries, Bryan. Story of my life. Thank you. Daniel, Paul, great event today. Super informative. I have two questions. One on just the curation side of podcasting and then on your new market growth. I think we've heard a lot about improvements in curation over the last year or two, just on the podcast side of things. I just wondered if you could maybe help qualify that. Obviously, you're bringing a ton of content on board over the next few years, and just trying to get a sense of sort of what levels of engagement improvement we can have or whether or not that incremental content sort of clogs the algos, if you will, and you don't necessarily see as much engagement improvement. That's one question.
The second one is just on new market growth. Curious if you think about these popular artists in markets like South Korea and Russia, et cetera, how much maybe pull of user growth do you think you'll see or can see from more artists as opposed to just your own acquisition initiatives? Thanks.
Yeah. I'll start with the first one. Maybe Paul, you can chime in on the second one. I think overall, as I kind of look at our opportunity on especially the user experience type, we have a ton of experience in music, but we're still early days when it comes to other long-form audio. If you think about it from a user standpoint, your investment in trying out a new song is about three minutes of your time. Your investment in trying a podcast is between half an hour to an hour. You're going to be a lot more considerate when you're choosing the types of podcasts that you're going to try to engage with, you're more well likely to go with existing brands than you are with something completely unknown.
I think that's all about building trust with the consumer, and we built it for music, but we still have a long way to go in building it in podcasting. Today, most of our efforts in podcasting is purely editorial. We try to contextualize and editorialize a lot of the content that goes in. Over time, you will see it becoming more and more personalized, and that's going to lead to a larger breadth of content being engaged by consumers. What we see then is that that will lead to overall engagement. What's interesting for us is the consumers that already are adopting to that type of behavior are way more likely to then also engage more with music, and then way more likely to also then start paying for Spotify.
That correlation is super clear in all of our data, and now it's really all about sort of experimenting and finding what are the best way to build that trust with consumers and going much, much, much more deeper in how we can do that. I think just to kind of frame the opportunity, I think in a few years' time, our machine learning and personalization system will be so good that today the reality is that if you wanted to, you can curate a better experience yourself on Spotify, even though Spotify is pretty good. In a few years' time, you won't even be able to do it better yourself.
Spotify will know you so well that we're going to be able to put that perfect morning playlist with a mix of music and the news and all the other content that you may want to hear on your morning commute. It's very unlikely that you'll make any changes at all other than tuning that experience. I think that's the kind of product vision you should expect. As that happens, it will dramatically impact people's engagement and willing to pay for the service and the content that's on this service. Paul, do you want to talk about the second question?
Yeah. I guess I'll follow up on the first one first, I also think when you think about in general, we've always sort of viewed data as our friend. I think sort of embedded in that question was, does all of this information and does all this content actually clog the system? I think it only makes our system better. You look at simple things like topic search on podcasting, which is sort of a new initiative where you could search, I think the example used was "Bi cooking ," and they come up with a whole number of podcasts related to that topic as opposed to a specific person or a podcast that you're thinking about, we'll learn from that.
When you think about the playlists and music and how they're evolving to be much more dynamic, where they're a combination of kind of learning from you and developing with you. Each one will be more unique. Right now you can think about 345 million unique experiences on Spotify, which I think will continue to expand. Then on the second question, I'm not sure I fully understood the second question.
Yeah, sure. Just to clarify, so I'm just thinking as you think about certain markets you're not in yet today that are, and I don't have a really good grasp for this, but if we're thinking like South Korea, in Russia or other markets, you talk about Pakistan or what have you, how many of those markets are driven by fewer and fewer artists? Meaning if those artists are looking for global reach, could a few artists be driving a significant amount of user growth in those markets for you, meaning pulling you as opposed to your own marketing?
Don't know if I have a great answer for that other than to say, I think to reiterate what Daniel had said on a prior question, on average, 80% of the music listened to for an artist is actually done in a market outside of their home country. We know that a lot of the music we have travels globally, and is very successful in markets outside of the home country. I don't see why that would be different in any of the newer markets. Obviously, there'll be different types of content. I can't see anything necessarily that would dominate more than something else. It might be different, but I don't foresee anything that would be different from that standpoint.
Okay, great. Super helpful. Thanks.
All right. Thanks, Mark. We've got time for one more question, and it's going to come from the line of Mario Lu from Barclays. Mario, the line is open.
Great. Thanks, Bryan. Hey, Daniel. Hey, Paul. A couple of questions, one on the new markets and one on HiFi. On the new markets, you guys mentioned that has a population of a billion plus with half connected to the internet. How penetrated are these regions in terms of audio streaming already, what are the main differences you are expecting entering these new markets versus prior geo expansions? Secondly, on HiFi, I believe this feature was rolled out previously. Any color you can share in terms of how the reception was historically with regards to both pricing and adoption rate from premium users. Thank you.
Yeah. I'll address the first one, then maybe, Paul, you want to address the second part, although I can say already we haven't launched HiFi yet, we have no sort of prior data to look at. As we look at sort of new markets and new market launches, I think the most important thing is, and what we've seen is, it's obviously not a big surprise that YouTube is a major player in most of these sort of emerging markets. People are certainly streaming to the extent, although audio streaming and in particular music streaming, and music subscription is not a dominant form in any of these markets. I was alluding to some of this before, one of the most exciting things that I'm seeing is this whole kind of notion of ambient computing. Like people are with the sort of white earphones and headphones.
It's a renaissance where people are listening to a lot more audio content than before. For most consumers, it's just not a great experience to have the video open and keep their screen open because it drains battery, et cetera. People want the experience of being able to listen to the content, put it down in the pocket and just be able to keep on listening. Secondly, the data part really, really matters, I think, in a lot of these emerging markets, too. I think we'll fare pretty well. If anything, I think the proxy markets of Russia and India, which a lot of people said were late days, but we've seen tremendous progress in even South Korea, which is a very mature market where we're seeing some strong early signs too.
There's a lot of pent-up demand for Spotify specifically, consumers, because of the internet, know about it and have been very excited. I think you can just go on Twitter and you'll see people in all of these markets raving about the fact that they soon can get their Spotify too. We really saw, honestly, the success with Russia and India, and that's partly why we accelerated the plan of launching all of these new markets.
Yeah. On the HiFi question, to Daniel's point, we don't really have any learnings yet to share on that. I would say, I think we're excited about the opportunity. I think when you think about, as I think Daniel mentioned on Stream On today, we're partnering with over 2,000 devices. Our ubiquity strategy allows us to hopefully be sort of very seamless for consumers who want to have it. Any device that has downloaded the most recent version of the Spotify SDK into their speaker, it will work if you've downloaded when it rolls out, if you've downloaded the most updated Spotify app, it'll work. We're also going to work with increasingly more partners on the speaker side and the sound side to make sure that it's as seamless as possible.
We feel like now is the right time for us because we think the opportunity is there. We know that the creators want it, but we also think that sort of our ubiquity strategy will allow it to roll out very seamlessly across all of our users.
Great. Thank you both.
All right, great. Thank you, Mario. Actually, thank you everyone for the questions and for joining us today and listening in. This is going to conclude our discussion and Q&A session. If you were unable to check out Stream On earlier today, a replay is available on our IR website, and a replay of this Q&A session will also be available as well. Thanks again, everybody, and we'll look forward to catching up with you all soon. Thanks.
Thank you, everybody.