Spotify Hosts a "Now Playing" Creator Day at its Los Angeles Campus

Daniel Ek, cofounder and CEO of Spotify (Presley Ann/Getty Images)

Profits tripled, paid subscribers up 12%, and record Q1 free cash flow — so why is Spotify sinking?

Spotify’s earnings had a lot to like, but near-term “noise” might be dampening investors’ appetite for the music streaming stock.

David Crowther

4/29/25 8:01AM

This morning, Spotify reported that it had 678 million monthly active users at the end of Q1, making 1 in 12 people on earth a user of the green streaming machine.

Paid subscribers to the music platform also rose 12% to some 268 million, helping drive the company’s operating profit to €509 million — more than triple the figure notched in the same quarter a year ago, as the company’s continued focus on profitability nearly makes up for years of consistent losses.

And yet, Spotify’s stock is down sharply in early premarket trading as traders ditch SPOT after comments made by the company’s CEO and a weaker user growth forecast.

In the press release detailing the Q1 results, cofounder Daniel Ek said that “the short term may bring some noise, but we remain confident in the long-term story, and the direction we’re heading in feels clearer than ever.” That comment, coupled with a forecast for monthly active users to hit 689 million in Q2, appears to be enough to shake confidence in the growth story at Spotify. Indeed, Wall Street estimates compiled by FactSet reveal that analysts were expecting Spotify to get to ~695 million monthly active users by the end of Q2.

That may not seem like a huge difference, but Spotify’s guidance implies just 2% MAU growth relative to where things were at the end of last year — a less exciting trajectory than Wall Street had anticipated.

On Monday, Spotify announced that it had already paid out more than $100 million to creators in the first quarter of 2025. Taking a leaf out of the YouTube playbook, Spotify has been doubling down on incentivizing creators to publish on the platform with revenue-sharing agreements.

More details are expected on the earnings conference call at 8 a.m. ET.

Luke Kawa

39m

Broadcom’s post-earnings romp continues on heavy volumes

As Broadcom enjoys a rush of new orders from a major new customer (reported to be OpenAI), it’s also reveling in a flood of traffic into the stock.

Volumes are running at 2.5 times their daily average through 1:20 p.m. ET as traders continue to bid up shares in response to the brighter outlook for 2026 revenues, which sent the stock up 9.4% on Friday.

The chip designer is basking in a flood of price target hikes from Wall Street, with Bank of America, JPMorgan, Argus Research, Citigroup, Bernstein, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Piper Sandler, Rosenblatt Securities, Wells Fargo, and Susquehanna upping their view on how high shares can go since the company reported earnings last week.

Separately, Taiwanese industry outlet DigiTimes is reporting that orders from several other leading tech companies for custom-made Broadcom chips (or ASICs) are “already in the pipeline.” This report has not been corroborated by our own or any other publication’s reporting to date.

Matt Phillips

SpaceX spectrum deal sends would-be rivals lower

Shares of struggling satellite services company EchoStar soared Monday, after the company — which had recently tottered close to bankruptcy — announced the sale of some of its wireless spectrum licenses to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s SpaceX for $17 million.

The sale provides a competitive advantage to Musk’s growing Starlink satellite services business, as the licenses it is acquiring from Echostar allows Starlink to operate ground based broadband and cellphone services, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Entities that stood to be hurt by the emergence of a Musk-led SpaceX Starlink service got hit hard on the news. AST SpaceMobile, which has plans to offer a similar satellite-to-consumer cellular service, tumbled.

So did wireless tower providers like Crown Castle and American Tower. Low cost cellular service provider T-Mobile, which had a deal with SpaceX, also slumped, as Luke noted earlier, along with other large wireless telecommunication services providers.

The wireless telecommunications industry grouping within the S&P 500 was down more than 2.5% shortly after noon, making it the worst performing industry within the S&P 500 on Monday.

SpaceX strikes $17B deal to buy EchoStar's spectrum for Starlink's direct-to-phone service | TechCrunch

The wireless telecommunications industry grouping within the S&P 500 was down more than 2.5% shortly after noon, making it the worst performing industry within the S&P 500 on Monday.

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J. Edward Moreno

Hims rises, Novo dips after FDA releases “green list” of GLP-1 raw material suppliers

Hims & Hers rose and Novo Nordisk slipped in early trading after the US Food and Drug Administration released a "green list" of foreign GLP-1 ingredient suppliers that it considers in compliance with agency standards.

Some telehealth companies like Hims sell copycat versions of Novo's and Eli Lilly’s blockbuster weight-loss drugs through compounding pharmacies, which take the active ingredients from FDA-approved medications and make adjusted, or "personalized,” versions of the drug for patients.

Novo and Lilly have fought against this, arguing that it infringes on their intellectual property. They've sued smaller telehealth providers, pharmacies, and clinics in lieu of any action against them from the FDA. Instead, the FDA gave compounders a list of suppliers it deems safe.

Recent developments in the cases filed by the drugmakers so far as well as the FDA's recent actions suggest telehealth companies may be in a less risky position than investors previously thought. As of Monday morning, prediction markets pegged the likelihood of a suit from Novo against Hims at 34%, down from about 70% earlier this month.

Luke Kawa

Gold is outperforming the Nasdaq 100 since the launch of ChatGPT

There’s a bull market in anti-humanity.