Spotify Technology S.A.

Good day and welcome to Spotify's third quarter 2026 earnings call and webcast. All participants are in a 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 Bryan Goldberg, head of investor relations. Thank you. Please go ahead.

All right, thanks, operator, and welcome to Spotify's third quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Joining us today will be our co-CEOs, Alex Norström and Gustav Söderström, and our CFO, Christian Luiga. 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 SpotifyEarningsQ326. Analysts can ask questions directly into Slido, and all participants can then vote on the questions they find the most relevant. 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 could differ materially 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 Alex.

Thank you, Bryan, and hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Let me start with the strength of the quarter. We made several commitments last quarter, and they've all landed either in line or better than expected. Our revenue came in right in line with what we guided at about 5 billion euro, up 14% at constant currency. MEU also landed right on target at 788 million. As we shared last quarter, we're optimizing our MEU growth across markets to scale our funnel and drive revenue growth over time. Subscribers came in ahead at 306 million, beating our guidance by 1 million. That strength shows up where it matters the most. Premium revenue grew 15%, driven by both subscriber growth and higher ARPU. Gross margin also came in ahead of expectations at 33%. This is a significant year-over-year expansion. Over the past 12 months, we've generated 3.2 billion euros in free cash flow. Ads is one of the areas of our business that I've spent time talking about, so I want to share our progress. We've been open with you that we're rebuilding this business, and we said the momentum would start to show in the second half of the year. And in Q3, ads grew 9% at constant currency, up from the 3% in each of the first two quarters. Further, our automated channels continue to scale, and sponsorship products are growing, particularly in podcasts. We're moving in the right direction, and there's more progress ahead. and on OPEX, we told you this would be a year of investment with operating expense growth peaking in Q3 and then moderating from Q4 and on. That's exactly what's happening. Christian will walk you through the details further, but as we know from experience, investing in our product, features and brand strengthens our position and we can see that playing out right now. So to build on this further, I'd like to use the rest of my time on what I think is an underappreciated part of our story, durability. When we went public in 2018, we had 71 million subscribers. Since then, every single year, we've been adding 25 million subs or more. And this year, we expect to reach 316 million subscribers. As I've mentioned before, very few consumer subscription businesses have ever reached this scale and few are still adding at this pace. Through a pandemic, price increases and a changing economy and consumer landscape, this steady growth in subscribers hasn't stopped. And this quarter, that growth came from every region. That's what durability looks like. Thank you for watching. Sweden is a clear demonstration of how high the opportunity can go. In our first and most established market, nearly 50% of the population pays for Spotify. Globally, that figure is still under 4%, and in key markets like the UK and Germany, it's between 20% and 25%. Latin America is around 11%, and then across emerging markets, we're less than 3%. What makes our position unique is how balanced it is. In developed markets we're growing a highly engaged monetizing base with a lot more room for growth. And in emerging markets we're still early with hundreds of millions of subs to come. This is a growth engine that compounds, building a bigger recurring revenue base. This is durability at scale. We also kept adding to what a subscription is worth this quarter. We signed a new multi-year agreement with Joe Rogan, whose show remains the world's most popular podcast. And we added Believe and TuneCore as a partner for remixes and covers. Remixes are as old as music itself, and we're working on a version that fans love and rights holders trust, with consent, credit, and compensation at the core. And as we've recently announced, we are expanding audiobooks to more than 180 markets by the end of the year, making Spotify the world's first global audiobook service. This enhances subscriber lifetime value, add-on monetization, and will benefit Spotify around the world. Gustav will share more about this. So, this was a quarter where we did what we said. We've built a strong business that keeps compounding, we invest when we see a path for growth, our costs are moderating, and there's more runway ahead. And having seen a preview of this year's Wrapped, I'm really looking forward to Q4 with a lot of excitement, and I can't wait to see how our fans respond. With that, let me hand it over to Gustav.