5/4/2022

speaker
Julianne
Conference Operator

Good morning. My name is Julianne and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Spotify's Q1 2022 earnings conference call and webcast. Brian Goldberg, Head of Investor Relations, you may begin your conference.

speaker
Brian Goldberg
Head of Investor Relations

Thanks, Operator, and welcome to Spotify's first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Joining us today will be Daniel Eck, our CEO, and Paul Vogel, our CFO. We'll start with opening comments from Daniel and Paul, and afterwards, we'll be happy to answer your questions. Questions can be submitted by going to slido.com, S-L-I-D-O.com, and using the code hashtag SpotifyEarningsQ122. Analysts can ask questions directly into Slido, and all participants can then vote on the questions they find the most relevant. We ask that you try to limit yourself to one to two questions, and to the extent you've got follow-ups, we'll be happy to address them, time permitting. If for some reason you don't have access to Slido, you can email investorrelations at ir at spotify.com, and we'll add in your question. 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 can materially differ because of factors discussed on today's call, in our letter to shareholders, and in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. During this call, we'll also refer to certain non-IFRS financial measures. Reconciliations between our IFRS and non-IFRS financial measures can be found in our letter to shareholders, in the financial section of our investor relations website, and also furnished today on Form 6K. And with that, I will turn it over to Daniel.

speaker
Daniel Ek
CEO

Alright, hi everyone and thank you so much for joining us. So I'll kick off by sharing a few of the highlights you may have seen in our shareholder letter. We delivered another strong quarter in Q1 and when you exclude the impact of our withdrawal from Russia, we came in line or ahead on every metric. And this performance builds on the momentum we saw in Q3 and Q4 of 2021, and I'm very pleased with the continued acceleration we're seeing in user growth headed into Q2. There are puts and calls in every quarter, and this one was no exception. As I've said several times before, Q1 traditionally sees lower new user activations, but despite this, we delivered solid results. And I think this is a testament of our consistency of execution and clearly shows just how compelling our offering remains for creators, users, and advertisers, even in the face of uncertainty provoked by world events. So it's safe to say that my overall confidence in the business continues to grow on all fronts. Case in point is the strength of our music business, evidenced by the recent release of new royalty data on our Loud and Clear website. The data clearly outlines the role Spotify and streaming are playing in growing the entire music ecosystem. Not only is streaming driving record revenues in the music industry, but there are more artists sharing in that success than ever before. In fact, the worldwide growth is truly staggering as more artists hit milestones across all revenue levels. So for the first time, over a thousand artists generated over a million dollars and over 50,000 artists generated more than $10,000 on Spotify alone. For those who are interested in learning more, I would encourage you to check out the Loud and Clear website. So our core business remains incredibly strong, and this strength is built on the investments we continue to make in constantly enhancing our platform, which in turn elevates the experience for users and creators. We are especially investing in our core platform capabilities. These are multi-year investments to enable a constant iteration across our products, tools, and services. And given the positive results we're seeing, you should expect this to continue for the foreseeable future. And I recognize that many of you want more clarity around when the benefits of all these investments will be realized, including when they will show up in our financial statements. And this is something we will unpack for you at our upcoming Investor Day. But to give you a sense of the breadth and the impact of our investments are already having for creators, users, and advertisers, allow me to offer a few examples of things we shipped this quarter. So take our ads business, which continues to be a strong revenue driver thanks to the investments we're making to modernize audio advertising. So recent third-party survey validate this belief, showing that Spotify is the must-buy audio ad partner in the US. And we're delivering more impact for advertisers and publishers through our acquisitions like Podsites and Chartable. And we are already seeing the impact these moves are having on renewal rates and deal sizes. And these moves will bring important innovation to the marketplace and accelerate our ability to unlock significant revenue growth in both music and podcasts. At Spotify, we're constantly testing and experimenting, and in Q1 alone, we ran almost 2,000 experiments, which is a 5% increase over the previous quarter. Some of those experiments led to full global product launches, like the new updates and campaigns we rolled out for Blend, which drove 17 times more user registration than even our annual Wrapped campaign. And in the first 20 days of the Blend campaign, we had 22 million users create Blend playlists. And we're also seeing incredible user engagement worldwide, with over 60% of streams coming from Gen C listeners on Blend. And these results are exactly the types of outcomes we aim to drive, and we will continue to aggressively experiment with further user improvements. And our podcast business also continues to surpass even our own high expectations, with podcast share of overall consumption hours reaching another all-time record last quarter. And we now have more than 4 million podcasts on our platform, up 53% year over year, and up from 3.6 million last quarter, with emerging markets like Latin America and Asia driving a lot of this growth. And with more than 1,150 original and exclusive shows on our platform, overall podcast consumption is strong and increasingly sticky, especially as we innovate with features like video, which more and more creators are taking advantage of as they seek to reach new global audiences and connect and interact with their fans in new ways. And with that, I'll hand it over to Paul to go a little bit deeper into the numbers, and then Brian will open it for Q&A.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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