Spotify Technology S.A.

Order 2024 earnings call and webcast. All participants are now listen-only mode. If you require operator assistance at any time, please press star zero. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Brian Goldberg, head of investor relations. Thank you. Please go ahead.

All right, thanks, Operator, and welcome to Spotify's fourth quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Joining us today will be Daniel Ek, our CEO, Alex Nordstrom, our co-president and chief business officer, Gustav Soderstrom, our co-president and chief product and technology officer, and Christian Luiga, our chief financial officer. We'll start with opening comments from the team, 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 SpotifyEarningsQ424. Thank you. 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 shareholder deck, 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 shareholder deck, in the financial section of our Investor Relations website, and also furnished today on Form 6K. And with that, I'll turn it over to Daniel.

All right. Thanks, Brian. Hey, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I wanted to start by speaking to the devastation caused by the LA fires. LA is home to hundreds of Spotify employees, millions of music fans, and countless members across the creative industries. We've committed our financial support to recovery efforts and will continue to look for ways to help those impacted. And before turning to the quarter, I wanted to introduce Chief Business Officer Alex Nordstrom and Chief Product and Technology Officer Gustav Söderström. Since they've been elevated to the role of co-presidents in January 2023, they've been leading much of the day-to-day operations at Spotify. And this has allowed me to spend more time working on the future of Spotify, which is where I've always believed I can have the biggest impact. And we'll aim to bring Alex and Gustav to future calls to share their perspectives on our goals and performance. So moving to our performance. We had a strong quarter and closed out 2024 even better than we anticipated. This gives us plenty of runway and flexibility for years to come. It was our highest Q4 ever for MEU additions and our second highest of all time. We also had record high subscriber additions. But that's not all. We set quarterly record highs for revenue, gross margin, operating income, and free cash flow as we closed out our first full year of profitability. So what drove this growth? Well, in large part, it's the result of countless improvements and tweaks we made over the past two years and continuous system of innovation that has brought us to where we are today. In Q4, we enhanced our product in areas like video and audio books with many more innovations to come in the quarters ahead. And it's really this ongoing commitment to incremental progress that ultimately adds up to something massive over the long term, even if the exact timing sometimes is hard to predict. Gustav, do you want to share a few thoughts on how we innovated the product given how consequential it's been for our growth?