Jem Aswad Executive Editor, Music Like most earnings calls, Spotify’s tend to be a combination of optimism and deflection amid buzzwords like “flywheels” and “toolboxes,” and co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek is among the best at answering direct questions vaguely — a key survival tool for any business head.
But Tuesday’s call, arriving against the backdrop of the company’s first-ever subscriber price increases in the U.S., found Ek and chief financial officer Paul Vogel more defensive than usual as they worked to bolster investor confidence in the face of the dollar-per-month U.S.
price increases — which the company announced on Monday, the day before the earnings call, and only after each of its competitors had already raised their prices.
Yet buried in one of the answers was a suggestion that more layoffs are to come at a company that is the world’s largest paid music-streaming service by a long shot — it announced that it now has 220 million paying subscribers — but likely remains years from profitability.
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