Spotify Technology - Q1 2023
April 25, 2023
Transcript
Operator (participant)
Good morning. My name is Julianne. I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Spotify's First Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. If you require operator assistance at any time, please press star zero.
I would now like to turn the call over to Bryan Goldberg, Head of Investor Relations. You may begin your conference.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
Thank you. Welcome to Spotify's first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Joining us today will be Daniel Ek, 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 sub-submitted by going to slido.com, S-L-I-D-O.com, and using the code #SpotifyEarningsQ123. 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 Investor Relations at [email protected], 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 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 6-K.
With that, I'll turn it over to Daniel.
Daniel Ek (Founder and CEO)
All right. Hey, everyone, thank you so much for joining us. As we open this call, I really can't help but feel a tremendous amount of excitement about the progress our team made this quarter. In fact, this quarter represents our strongest Q1 since going public. Over the last few months, we've celebrated a few significant milestones, including surpassing over half a billion users and reaching more than 200 million subscribers. Further, our user growth exceeded our expectations by 15 million and our subscriber numbers by 3 million. At our scale, it is pretty remarkable to see this level of reacceleration in our user growth. It is a trend that's been consistent now for over the last five quarters. In fact, the last two quarters saw the largest MAU growth in our history.
The outperformance was broad-based, meaning growth was pretty evenly spread across every region without a single market dominating. On top of this, we were able to accomplish this level of growth with lower marketing spend. We look at this as a promising sign, but it's too early to draw any conclusions yet. As you heard me say repeatedly over the years, a healthy top-line user growth is the leading indicator of our ability to achieve future success on all other financial metrics. When we successfully attract new users, it's only a matter of time before the conversion rate to subscriber increases, which then, of course, drives our revenue upwards over the long term. This is a formula that's been worked for us exceptionally well and one I fully expect to play out again.
Speaking of long term, I want to spend a moment talking about our approach to investment timelines and the outcomes they can deliver when we stay on the course. Let me give you a recent example. For those who tuned in to our March Stream On event, we unveiled numerous creator tools and debuted an entirely new and updated Spotify experience, including a first-of-its-kind AI DJ. These changes marked the biggest updates to our user experience since we introduced mobile more than 10 years ago. Of course, this didn't happen overnight. These are things that we've been building on over the last 12 to even 18 months, and in some cases even longer. As we shift to rolling out these features as well as several others across our 184 markets, we're seeing an acceleration in MAU retention and subs.
Sometimes our investments manifest themselves immediately, but more often than not, their impact is gradual and takes shape over several quarters or sometimes even years. While we really can't anticipate when the benefits will materialize, we do know that our growth is a consequence of our relentless pursuit of learning, iterating, and improving. We make strategic investments, and we wait for the results to compound, proving out the benefits for users, creators, and of course, our other stakeholders. By delivering an exceptional experience that is centered on creating value for these stakeholders over time, we're seeing a correlation with a stronger financial performance. I've often talked about the fact that our success is not attributable to just one thing, but literally hundreds, if not sometimes even thousands of improvements that we're investing in and working on in parallel.
That's not to say that every one of them ends up producing the outcomes we strive for, but over time, the things that do work, they do add up, and together they have a compounding effect. Think of it really as waves of innovation, investment, and improvement. There's an ebb and there's a flow over time, but over time, it really becomes more predictable and produces steadier results. The key then, it seems, is to maintain a long-term focus to help us navigate current short-term uncertainties. Don't let all my talk about the importance of long-term investing allow you to believe that we are rethinking our commitment to driving efficiency.
As many know, last quarter and building on what we shared at last year's Investor Day, I talked about shifting towards becoming a more efficient company. There's really no question that we've become leaner in the last six months, but this progress is still early in its reflection on our financials. The actions we've taken, coupled with other opportunities to reduce spending in areas like marketing and content production and real estate, should lead to a steady progression of key metrics throughout the year, all of which makes me even more bullish about the remainder of 2023 and beyond.
With that, I'll turn it over to Paul for more detail behind the numbers, and then Bryan will open it up for the Q&A.
Paul Vogel (CFO)
Great. Thanks, Daniel, and thanks everyone for joining us. Let's start with Q1. User growth was exceptionally strong in the quarter. Total monthly active users grew to 550 million in Q1. This was 15 million ahead of guidance, up 26 million quarter-over-quarter, the largest Q1 net additions in our history and the second largest all-time, only surpassed by Q4 of last year. The strength was broad-based, and we hit record Q1 net additions across nearly all age demographics in both developed and developing regions. Moving to Premium, we finished the quarter with 210 million subscribers, 3 million ahead of guidance, thanks once again to broad-based strength across all regions. Engagement trends were strong in Q1, with healthy uplift to year-over-year growth in content hours per MAU across all platforms.
We also saw positive trends in our DAU to MAU ratio, as well as in churn. Our revenue grew 14% year-on-year, topping EUR 3 billion in the quarter. Results in the quarter were just slightly behind forecasts, as Premium revenue slightly outperformed, offset by a very modest underperformance in advertising. This marks the first Q1 in Spotify's history where we surpassed EUR 300 million in ad revenue. Turning to gross margin, gross margin of 25.2% was above guidance by 30 basis points. Moving to operating expenses, growth was lower than forecast, helped by less marketing spend than planned. When combined with our better gross profit, operating loss was ahead of guidance by EUR 38 million. The better-than-planned results also include EUR 44 million of severance-related charges. Free cash flow was a positive EUR 57 million in Q1.
Looking ahead, it's clear we have a lot of momentum coming out of Q1. With respect to second quarter guidance, we continue to see strong momentum in MAU and subscribers. We are forecasting 530 million MAU, an increase of 50 million from Q1, and 217 million subscribers, an increase of 7 million over Q1. We are forecasting EUR 3.2 billion in total revenue, a gross margin of roughly 25.5%, and an operating loss of approximately EUR 129 million. On revenue, the currency translation benefits we've been experiencing for the last six quarters are expected to reverse in Q2, led by the weakening U.S. dollar relative to the euro. As a result, we are forecasting a 300 basis point headwind to growth.
Excluding this effect, our constant currency revenue will be closer to EUR 3.3 billion, reflecting our expectation for accelerating currency-neutral growth to 14% versus 13% growth we delivered in Q1. From a profitability standpoint, we continue to expect a steady ramp in gross margins throughout 2023, as well as sequential improvements in our operating loss. One final note, as Daniel mentioned in his remarks, we will continue to be diligent regarding operating efficiency improvements and will be looking at areas such as real estate optimization. During Q2, we hope to finalize some of these decisions, and this could lead to a material non-cash charge during the quarter. We have not included any potential charges in our Q2 guidance, but should they occur, we will break them out during our Q2 earnings report.
With that, I'll turn it back over to Bryan.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
All right. Thanks, Paul. Again, if you've got any questions, please go to slido.com, #SpotifyEarningsQ123. We'll be reading the questions in the order they appear in the queue with respect to how people vote up their preference for questions. Our first question today is going to come from Matthew Thornton on advertising. Ad revenue actually re-accelerated in first quarter, which would seem better than feared. Can you talk to what you're seeing in the ad market, i.e., how it performed relative to your expectations and linearity through and exiting the quarter?
Paul Vogel (CFO)
Yeah, as I said in my opening comments, we're slightly behind on the ad side, about EUR 15 million, about EUR 20 million or so. The quarter was choppy. Again, incrementally throughout the quarter, it got a little bit better. We feel like we have momentum heading into Q2, but, you know, I think we've had similar sort of trends heading into Q1 as well, so it's a little bit too early to say. You know, overall, I think we feel really good about our relative position in the ad market and how we performed, relative to how the overall market performed in Q1. Again, it was a bit up and down. We missed by a small amount, but nothing really that concerns us in any way.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
All right. Our next question is going to come from Mike Morris on AI. Use of AI technology to create new music has resulted in concern from artists and rights holders, as seen with the recent fake Drake track. What is Spotify's responsibility in allowing or preventing the distribution of created music that draws from another artist's work?
Daniel Ek (Founder and CEO)
Yeah, I mean, first off, let's acknowledge that this is a incredibly fast-moving and developing space. I don't think, in my history with technology I've ever seen anything moving as fast as the development of AI currently, is at the moment. Obviously, you pointed out in your question that there's two parts of this. One is, you know, our role as a platform for allowing innovation of creative works, and then, how we do to protect the creators and the artist ecosystem that we care so deeply about. The big part of this is we have that dual focus, and we take that role of, you know, a guardian, the artist creativity and the support that we are doing for artists and creators, very, very seriously.
We're in constant dialogue with the industry about these things, and it's important to state that there's everything from, what you mentioned, sort of fake, tracks, from artists, which falls in one bucket, to everything of just augmenting using AI to allow for expression, which probably falls in the more lenient and easier bucket. These are very, very complex issues that don't have a single, straight answer on how you'd take the position depending on what would happen. We're in constant discussion with our partners and creators and artists, and wanna strike a balance between allowing innovation and of course, protecting artists.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
Okay, next question from Justin Patterson on operating efficiency. "On the fourth quarter earnings call, you framed efficiency as a top priority for Spotify. As you've transitioned to a new org structure, how are you measuring your initial progress on speed and efficiency? When can we expect these efforts to roll in more meaningfully to gross margin and operating expense?
Daniel Ek (Founder and CEO)
Yeah. I'll start, and maybe Paul can add to it. We're early on in our new org structure and the way we're working, but I'm feeling really good about it so far. The leading indicators that I look to is really just speed of decision-making. And we've really kind of driven more collaboration and more speed of decisions now than we've had probably at any other time in the Spotify history. I feel good about that. That obviously will still take some time before that then leads into actual products that then leads to actual business results. I think as it relates to that, we still have some ways to go before investors will see the actual output.
When I talked about efficiency, it's important to note that that's just one part of the equation. The other part of the equation, obviously, on efficiency is just being diligent on what we invest in and what we spend on. I don't know, Paul, if you wanna talk a little bit more about what we're seeing there.
Paul Vogel (CFO)
I would add a couple things. One is I think we've talked about on the gross margin side, seeing sequential improvement throughout 2023, and nothing's changed there. You saw the Q1 number come in, you saw the Q2 guidance is sequentially better than Q1, and we expect that to persist throughout 2023. And same thing on the operating loss. We expect to see incremental leverage throughout the year, and with the sequential improvement in operating loss as well. We're starting to see it come through on those lines.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
All right. Next question on, from Matthew Thornton on our subscription business. "ARPU was a little lower than expected. Can you talk to what's driving that, i.e., how did FX, plan mix, market mix, promotional activity vary versus your initial expectations and guidance, and how should we think about ARPU looking forward?
Paul Vogel (CFO)
It's kind of a combination of all the things you mentioned. You know, clearly, we beat on the subscriber side by 3 million. You know, when we have that upside, some of it came from additional growth in our family and duo plans, as well as people coming on promotional, all of those have an impact on ARPU. I would say the product mix, meaning, more users coming in on family and duo is probably the biggest driver. Again, it's pretty minor in terms of where it came in on ARPU, and it was pretty much in line with our expectations, maybe a hair below from an ARPU standpoint, but not material.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
Okay. Another question from Justin Patterson. This is on our recent product updates. "Daniel, could you share any initial learnings on listener and creator reactions to the new user interface? With the new user interface released, how should we think about the pace of product improvements and monetization opportunities going forward?
Daniel Ek (Founder and CEO)
Yeah. Perhaps just to start by setting context, you know, it was a very successful event. We've had massive amounts of feedback, both from users and creators, where in particular, this was a creator-focused event, so creators have been overwhelmingly positive about all the new tools that they now have to express themselves and to connect with their audience. But it's also, to temper expectations, it's probably one of the largest single changes in the history of Spotify. We take that very seriously. For instance, the new home feed that we announced is still being rolled out, so most consumers in the world don't yet have access to that.
We're rolling it out slowly just to make sure we have performance dialed up and that we can react to the feedbacks, and we've already made lots of iterations, you know, with the user feedback we've gotten. It will be very successful when it's fully rolled out, and I feel really good about that. I'm using this as a moment to educate all investors and analysts as well, that there are some product improvements that we do that you just can't turn on the button on, and there's some that you can.
This happened to be one of those things that takes multi quarters for us to roll out because it's not just a feature or something else, it's a whole new infrastructure behind it with a whole new instrumentation for our AI tools, as well. It's, it's an important piece of infrastructure that we're basically still rolling out. I feel really good about it and the response. I think once that's fully rolled out, we can iterate massively on top of that as well. The big focus for the next few months from the teams is just really kind of rolling this out, making sure it's very performant and that we can start then allowing our machine learning and AI teams to start iterating on top of that.
We'll see compounding improvements for many years, just like I outlined in my initial remarks.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
Okay, next question from Mario Lu. With regards to the 6% workforce reduction announced earlier this year, is that the final or first round of reductions this year? Should we expect any additional severance charges other than the EUR 41 million in your operating expense in Q1?
Paul Vogel (CFO)
Let me take with the second part first, just to get it out of the way. The EUR 41 million is the charge on the operating expense line. It was actually EUR 44 million overall. There was a small component of a severance that hit gross margin. There's been two numbers that have been floating out there, but it's EUR 44 million in total, EUR 41 million that hit the OpEx and then that EUR 3 million that hit the gross margin side. In terms of you know, workforce, nothing else to add in terms of workforce reductions. I think we've talked about all that kind of Daniel, you know, take the efficiency side from here.
Daniel Ek (Founder and CEO)
Yeah, I mean, the only thing I'd really add is that we have really become a lot leaner over the last six months. I think that progress is still early in its reflection on our financials. What investors should probably expect going forward is for us to keep looking for ways that can help us. That includes obviously everything from our real estate footprint. We will keep reviewing, you know, the content deals we've made. Are they performing, not performing? Obviously have a much higher hurdle rates, as I mentioned last quarter as well on any new investments going forward.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
Okay. Question from Rich Greenfield. For Daniel, would love to hear your perspective on the recent Apple versus Epic ruling. Being able to message about paying for Spotify off platform is clearly positive, but it appears that the court largely sided with Apple. Would also love to hear more about your recent trip to Washington, D.C.
Daniel Ek (Founder and CEO)
Yeah, Rich. I would characterize it probably as disappointed but not surprised with the ruling. As you rightly called out, it does still include the anti-steering provision, which I think is very important and a good step in the right direction. I think it's also worthwhile pointing out, I just briefly read through the judge's remarks, so I may be getting this wrong, but I'll try to paraphrase it, where the judge, I think, was referring and reacting to the fact that there's a larger conversation going on in Washington about future regulation, and the judge just noted that they were simply making a decision, a ruling based on the existing law and not future regulation.
This is kind of the point why I went to Washington. I do believe new laws are needed for this and that the App Store bill or OAMA bill that is also called, is a very much needed improvement. I had great meetings. I really did from bipartisan, both Republicans and Democrats. I found them to be very supportive of the issue, very understanding of some of these things. I think a lot of the people I spoke to didn't realize it was this bad.
For us just to kind of level set for those that may not be involved in, in the intricate details, the primary issue for me is that when I started as a 14-year-old entrepreneur, the internet was this democratic place that anyone, anywhere in the world could have an impact. Right now, we're in a place where billions of consumers are using the internet primarily through smartphones and primarily through apps. There's literally two companies now that control all of that on the internet, and they can unilaterally change the rules. They, in Apple's case, can prevent us from talking to our customers and prevent customers from even understanding that there are better deals in the marketplace. This is super important to me on a principle level. I want better climate for innovation to bring progress.
I want consumers and if they've opted into communication from a company, I want that company to be able to communicate to that consumer without the interference of these platforms. Those message point really resonated across both the House and the Senate and across the aisle of both Republicans and Democrats. I feel encouraged, but it's still early days here in the U.S. Obviously, we've had a lot more progress on this issue lately in Europe.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
Great. Next question from Mario Lu on gross margin. Gross margins beat guidance by 30 basis points but saw a drag from other cost of revenue. Can you explain what within other cost of revenue was the main drag, and if that's expected to continue going forward?
Paul Vogel (CFO)
Yeah. There's a little bit of nuance in this, so, let me kind of go through it. When you look throughout 2022 into 2023, we'd seen a sort of steady increase on the other cost of revenue line. A lot of that has come from, you know, streaming delivery and other compute costs that had slowly risen throughout the year and had been impacting us. When you look at it, Q1 versus Q1, that trend had still continued, so it put a little bit of pressure on the gross margin as a negative.
That being said, some of the outperformance we saw in Q1 actually related to that being less of a drag than we thought and starting to see some of the efficiency improvements and initiatives that we put in place starting to pay off. While the increase that we've seen for the last kind of, you know, three, four quarters persisted, the incremental increase was less given some of the efficiencies. We feel really good about that. We've got more plans in place to continue to improve that line item, which is sort of the non-royalty, royalty-bearing side of gross margin. I think we're in a good place moving forward with how that should trend.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
Okay, next question from Douglas Anmuth on podcasting: With a decent amount of hit podcast content deals seemingly up for renewal in 2023 and 2024, what gives you confidence you can retain exclusive talent while not overpaying and over-investing?
Daniel Ek (Founder and CEO)
Yeah. I think you're right in calling out the overpaying and over-investing and what I can start out by saying is we're not gonna do that. We're going to be very diligent in how we invest in future content deals. The ones that aren't performing, obviously, we won't renew, and the ones that are performing, we will obviously look at those on a case-by-case basis on the relative value. I would say two things here. One, we have very sophisticated tools for measuring impact on the platform, where, you know, we talked about this at the Investor Day, where we do understand the relative impact on lifetime value on our subscribers and so on and so forth.
I think that helps us paying a fair price or understanding what a fair price would be. The second part, also, because we are now the largest podcasting platform, that means we have a great opportunity to amortize across a larger base. Relative to someone that's smaller, we should be in a better position should we want to renew a deal because we obviously can amortize that against a larger base of users.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
Okay, question from Benjamin Black on subscription pricing: Since you haven't raised pricing, are you seeing any benefit from being the lower cost distributor?
Daniel Ek (Founder and CEO)
One would think so, given the outperformance in the quarter. Again, it is important to note that it's been a fairly broad-based, the outperformance. Just by way of context, we did raise prices in 46 different occasions and markets last year. It's not like we haven't raised prices, and even in those markets, we were still outperforming. You know, I've said this before, and I'll say it again, I feel really good about our ability to raise prices over time, that we have that ability, and we have lots of data now that backs that up. We may have been marginally helped by being a lower cost provider, but it isn't a primary part of our strategy, and it's not something that we're thinking about.
Instead, we're working with our label partners to really work with them to figure out what's the best opportunity for us to do that. That's obviously a more complex trade with many other variables. I've talked about that before. When the timing is right, we will raise it. I think that price increase will go down well because we're delivering a lot of value for our customers.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
Okay, another question from Richard Greenfield on advertising: You've talked about advertising revenue scaling to be 20% of your overall revenue. While it's growing faster than subscription revenue, the mix hasn't moved a lot. How should we think about the timing of getting to 20%, let alone 30% of your revenues?
Paul Vogel (CFO)
Yeah, Rich, I think we still feel really good about the ability for advertising to grow and be a larger part of Spotify's revenue mix. You know, right now there's one part of it we can control and one part we can't control. The part we can control is to continue to build out the tools, the services, the measurement, the attribution, all of the things that we think we're doing to bring an even better advertising product to Spotify, and that continues on, and we feel really good about the advancements we've made there. You know, obviously, in the last quarter or two, we've been somewhat impacted by macro. Again, we feel like we're growing nicely and outperforming the market and our peer group overall, but the macro has probably slowed us down.
I don't really think that a couple of quarters of macro uncertainty is going to change our long-term view of how we get to 20% or even beyond that. For us, it's really just heads down, making sure that the product and innovation is there, so that when the macro does come back, we can benefit as much as we possibly can.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
A question from Doug Anmuth on AI DJ: Could you give us your thoughts on how AI DJ plays out given your launch of the beta version at Stream On and subsequent copyright pushback from some of the major labels?
Daniel Ek (Founder and CEO)
Yeah. I do think it's important to kind of separate AI DJ from the sort of AI conversation. AI DJ in and on itself, I think we've had nothing but positive reactions from across the industry. I think the AI pushback from, you know, the copyright industry or labels and media companies, it's really around really important topics and issues like name and likeness, what is an actual copyright, who owns the right to something where you upload something and claim it to be Drake, and it's really not, and so on. Those are legitimate concerns.
Obviously, those are things that we're working with our partners on in trying to establish a position where we both allow innovation, but at the same time protect all of the creators that we have on our platform.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
Okay, next question from Michael Morris on subscription pricing: Do you plan to raise price on any of your current plans during 2023? What are the current considerations to changing pricing?
Daniel Ek (Founder and CEO)
I can start and then maybe Paul can chime in. I think it's important, perhaps just add as a context here, as I mentioned in my prior response, we raised prices in 46 places last year. I would like and hope for us to do that in 2023 as well, but we're in discussion with our partners around that, so that's a really a negotiation thing. I think maybe to up level it, what we're trying to do is we're just really trying to focus on how can we optimize for growth. There are many ways to achieve growth.
You can grow top-line users that then subsequently will turn into conversion to Premium subscribers that then subsequently will turn into revenue, or you can increase ARPU on a lower set of base and you can still achieve that top-line growth. We have many tools at our disposal as we're thinking about how to increase growth, and the industry realizes that and our label partners realizes that as well. That's the constant dialogue that we're in. Yeah, we would like to raise prices in 2023, but it's really a discussion with our partners.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
Okay, another question from Douglas Anmuth on Marketplace. How should we think about the outlook for Marketplace growth this year following approximately 40% growth in 2022?
Paul Vogel (CFO)
Yeah, I think we're still very optimistic about Marketplace. It had a really strong Q1. It continues to be a driving force for engagement with the creator community. They're loving the tools and services. We haven't given a target out for 2023, but Q1 was very strong and we're optimistic that we'll continue to sort of be able to advance all the offerings we have in Marketplace.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
Okay, next question from Deepak on podcasting: Can you provide some recent some color on recent engagement trends on the podcast side? Revenue growth is healthy even as you optimize the content portfolio. We're curious on the recent engagement trends within podcasts.
Daniel Ek (Founder and CEO)
Yeah. Overall, Q1 has been a phenomenal quarter when it comes to engagement. Engagement is up, more than predicted on pretty much every front. Retention is higher, the DAU over MAU is higher than before, and the actual engagement is higher. That's across music, but it's certainly true on podcasting as well, and we've seen a healthy trend sort of up to the right on podcasting for now many quarters. We're seeing how both podcast and music is acting in great symbiosis together to drive an overall healthier user funnel on Spotify. I feel really good about the mix, and obviously that's a testament to the great catalog and content portfolio we have on both music and podcasts.
Paul Vogel (CFO)
Yeah, I would just add, the one other metric, listening hours per MAU was really strong in the quarter, both across music and podcasting. To Daniel's point on the engagement side, we're seeing a number of our engagement metrics, really uptick in Q1.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
Okay, another question from Douglas Anmuth on users. Given the first quarter upside and the first half outlook, how do you think about overall net adds and growth for MAUs and Premium subscribers in 2023 relative to the 83 million and 25 million added respectively in 2022?
Paul Vogel (CFO)
Yeah, we don't obviously give full year guidance anymore, but implied in the question is sort of where we already are. If you think about, between Q1 and our, and our outlook for Q2, we're, you know, just over 40 million net additions on the MAU side, so we'd be halfway to last year through half of this year. The same thing on the sub side. About, you know, if we hit our guidance for Q2, that's about 12 million sub additions. Again, about halfway to next year. Nothing really other to, other to add other than we feel really good about the trends and the trajectory we've seen on both the user side and the sub side for the, for Q1 and our expectations for Q2.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
Okay. Next question is from Deepak on AI: Daniel, can you discuss your thoughts on what opportunities and risks there are from generative AI, specifically on music creation? Do you think these developments have potential to materially shift economics towards distribution platforms like Spotify over time?
Daniel Ek (Founder and CEO)
Yeah. Well, so, again, to caution everyone, this is very early days and it's an incredibly fast developing space. As I mentioned before, I don't think I've ever seen anything like it in technology, how fast innovation and progress is happening and all the really both cool and scary things that people are doing with AI at the moment. I think it's important, I guess, on the risk side, would be not just for Spotify, but I think for our, the entire creative ecosystem is obviously, you know, the question around copyrights and who owns what copyrights and what the fair way would be to attribute value, when you're doing things in name and likeness situations or inspired by a certain artist, et cetera.
I think the whole industry is trying to figure that out and trying to figure out training, and that I would definitely put that on the risk account because there's a lot of uncertainty, I think, for the entire ecosystem. On the positive side, to flip on that for a moment, because I don't think that's been as highlighted as part of the story, one, I think, this could be potentially huge for creativity on the positive side. I go in and talk a little bit more in detail about this on our For the Record podcasts, that's a little bit of a plug for you guys to listen to that if you're interested in understanding more.
The short of it would be, if you really think about it, with that now these conversational interfaces, it will allow people, Perhaps don't know anything about how to play a music or even know these complex softwares, music production software tools to now create, just using their voice, instruct the AI to, make something to sound a little bit more upbeat, make something sound a little bit, more like, add some congas into the mix when you're creating a drum pattern or something like it. That has the chance, I think, to meaningfully augment that creative journey that many artists do.
You could even imagine someone just humming something and then the AI helping out by creating a backdrop that you then can edit and alter into your existing DAW, which is the music, sort of, software environment that many producers and music creators are doing. That should lead to more music. That more music, obviously we think is great culturally, but it also benefits Spotify because the more creators we have on our service, the better it is and the more opportunity we have to growing the engagement and growing the revenue. That, that would be on the upside, which a lot of people aren't talking about.
Of course, there's entirely new potential products that perhaps can happen where you could have users creating their own music and perhaps Spotify could be a conduit of that. I think it's way too early to speculate on those types of things at present moment.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
Okay. Another question from Richard Greenfield: At the Investor Day last year, you talked about introducing three new verticals looking beyond music, podcasts and audiobooks. When should we expect to hear more?
Daniel Ek (Founder and CEO)
Yeah. Obviously I don't have anything to announce at this moment. In the pipeline, there's two that's progressing very nicely out of the three. Then there's a few candidates of the third that's a little, in a little bit of an earlier stage than that. You know, again, this is just me kind of more hinting at that, we have things in the work. I mentioned this prior in my opening remarks.
Many of these things that we are working on is not the product of something that we started three months ago or six months ago, but we have projects that's been, you know, being worked at Spotify by teams for sometimes two, three, even four years, before we are ready to announce them for the world. We have a very good sense what those are, those three, and two of them are right now progressing very nicely. Not ready yet to announce them. We'll see when they're ready for primetime.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
Okay. Question coming from Benjamin Black on advertising: Could you give us an update on the advertising backdrop? How have ad sales trended so far in April? Shouldn't you benefit from easing year-on-year comparisons as the year progresses?
Paul Vogel (CFO)
On the second part of the question, yes, the comps do get easier throughout the year, which will definitely benefit us. In terms of April, we feel like we had some momentum coming out of March into April, so that's positive. That being said, I think we felt that there was some momentum in Q1 and it ended up being pretty choppy as well. I think we're optimistic, but also cautiously optimistic would be the right word. 'Cause I think we feel like there's some momentum there. I think we feel good about where we're positioned on an advertising standpoint. Just given the macro uncertainty, I think we'll, you know, caveat it as cautiously optimistic.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
Okay. Another question from Douglas Anmuth on podcasting: Can we get an updated view on timing for podcasting profitability? When should we expect to see a meaningful inflection in ad-supported gross margins?
Paul Vogel (CFO)
Yeah. No change to what we said. Look, we think we continue to see the loss, the podcasting loss continue to get better throughout the year. The targets we gave at the Investor Day with respect to podcasting breakeven and then profitability have not changed. We still feel good about that. The ad-supported gross margins, I mean, there's really two factors that are impacting that, which we've talked about. Podcasting is a big part of that. As the podcasting loss turns to breakeven and then profitability, that will obviously help the ad-supported gross margins a lot. We do have some markets and regions where our ads gross margins aren't quite where they are in some of our more established and developed advertising markets.
We're still working on getting some of those markets, kind of ad parity with our more developed ad markets. It's a combination of the two. Obviously the transition from the podcasting business from being a drag to a breakeven and profitability will be a big help.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
All right. We've got time for a couple more questions. looks like Douglas Anmuth has a follow-up on operating expenses. You had 36% growth year-on-year in OpEx in the first quarter, with roughly half of that driven by Social Charges movements and severance. How should we expect that to improve throughout 2023, and what are the key areas of leverage?
Paul Vogel (CFO)
Yeah, it's a great question. Thanks for bringing it up. Of the 36% growth, about a third of that was Social Charges and then another 600 basis points or so from severance. To your point, yes, it was about a big chunk of the OpEx expense growth came from that. I think you'll see a couple of things. One, if you look at our headcount from a year-over-year basis, we're still up. As we go throughout the year, assuming no changes to headcount, is in guidance, I'm just using this as sort of an illustrative example. Assuming no changes in headcount, those comps just get easier throughout the year as we start to lap the reduction we had a few months ago.
Again, you know, Q1 the year-over-year is pretty tough, and it gets easier. That'll help on the leverage side. Then you saw in Q1, we definitely had some leverage on the marketing side, where we spent a little bit less than expected, and we're still able to grow users and subs pretty phenomenally. As Daniel said, we're not reading into that too much after one quarter, but it's obviously something we're monitoring to see how that goes for the rest of the year.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
Okay, we've got a question from Jed Kelly: We're seeing the stock price benefit from strong MAU growth and improving gross margins. If this continues, does this place Spotify in a favorable position to negotiate a quote, unquote, "win-win outcome" with the labels on any incremental price increases?
Daniel Ek (Founder and CEO)
Yeah, I don't know that I think the stock price impacts our negotiations with our content partners. I don't think that has any real impact. As I tried to describe before, usually when we're negotiating outcomes, it's very rare that it's a single issue we are negotiating with them. It's usually a package of different things that we tend to agree on. One can almost think of them as bilateral treaties, so you kind of have to negotiate them for a while, and there's a lot of puts and calls into those things. It's a whole sort of set of discussions, and there's a number of different variables that go into them. Again, I think we're ready to raise prices.
I think we have the ability to do that, but it really comes down to those negotiations.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
All right. Our last question today is gonna come from Maria Ripps on advertising: Could you discuss and/or rank order what you consider to be the biggest drivers of advertising in 2023? How much of the growth will be a function of an improving macro backdrop, increased advertiser engagement with the emerging formats, greater inventory availability given recent investments or anything else?
Paul Vogel (CFO)
Yeah, I think there's a lot in that question. Look, I think there's a lot to our advertising growth. Let's kind of unpack it. Some of it has been, you know, we talked about, we've invested in regionally in growing some of our sales capabilities in Europe and rest of world. We saw some of the benefit of that in Q1. There's sort of an expense ahead of the benefit there, and I think we talked about that throughout 2022. That's one, getting some more leverage on some of the investments we made last year just on the people side.
Two would be, as we keep talking about, we're really gonna lead with technology innovation here, better measurement, better attribution, better targeting. Those are improvements that we expect to see throughout 2023 and beyond. There'll be some benefits from that as well. You know, as you said, the macro is the big wild card. It's hard to predict it. We think that we continue to build out a platform that will be really strong and will benefit when the macro gets better and something that can still outperform even when the macro, you know, remains uncertain.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
All right. Thanks, Maria, and that concludes our Q&A session for today. Now I'm going to turn it back over to Daniel for some closing remarks.
Daniel Ek (Founder and CEO)
All right. Well, thanks, Bryan. In closing, this was a phenomenal quarter with significant outperformance. I continue to feel really good about what we're accomplishing. We closed out 2022 on a high note, and this quarter continued that momentum. More importantly, we are consistently seeing that our long-term approach to innovation is working. As we move forward with an increased focus on efficiency, we're even better positioned to translate these efforts into a better business performance.
Thank you again for joining us, and as usual, feel free to check out our For the Record podcast dropping later today.
Bryan Goldberg (Head of Investor Relations)
Okay. That concludes today's call. A replay will be available on our website and also on the Spotify app under Spotify Earnings Call Replays. Thanks, everyone, for joining.