Spotify Technology S.A. (NYSE:SPOT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Daniel Ek: And then you can chime in because I think some added context here might be pretty good as well. So, I think the big thing that I just want to highlight again is we mentioned, as Paul said before, that 2022 would be an investment year. And we broke out the various verticals where you would see that music have been making steady improvements, but obviously, our podcasting business had been a drag to our gross margin profile. And we also then announced that 2023 would be a year where you see the reversal of some of those trends. So, I just wanted to add that context that, that’s still very much on the top line for us that you should expect music to be meaningfully improving with things like Marketplace playing an important role. And then podcasting, both as it grows in size with advertising revenue, but also more efficient spending will mean that you’ll see improvements there as well. And then, Paul, maybe you can chime in on the detailed questions.

Paul Vogel : Yes, I can be quick now. So, the answer is yes to 2022 being the peak drag from podcast. Yes, the podcast reaching breakeven within several years. And yes, we still believe our consolidated gross margins can reach 30% in five years.

Bryan Goldberg: Okay. Our next question is going to come from Justin Patterson. This is for Daniel. As Alex takes on responsibility as Chief Business Officer, how should we think about his priorities and leadership for content and advertising, how those might differ from Dawn’s?

Daniel Ek: I don’t think from a strategy point of view that it will differ all that much from Dawn’s. However, again, the primary reason why we did this reorg was to drive speed and drive more efficiency. So, speed will come in having more decision-making and faster decision-making. Essentially, Spotify is a lot more complex of a business than it was several years ago. And so, to have both Gustav and Alex help me in the day-to-day in this much more complex business, I think, will materially mean that we’ll have more brains thinking about these things. We’ll be having more decision-making so that we can make decisions faster because that honestly is one of the biggest blocker at this point. It’s not that we can’t execute on the ground.

It is actually making real sort of material decision-making at the top. That’s been one of our — things that we need to speed up when we look at sort of the internal feedback. And then we’re going to holistically now look at the business rather than looking at things bit by bit. So, marketing was under Alex preview previously, but not advertising and not content. And now we’re holistically looking at it as one P&L and focus on driving efficiency across the board by readdressing resources to where it’s most needed. And that will be a big improvement from prior org setups.

Bryan Goldberg: All right. Next question from Doug Anmuth, users and subscriber growth in ’23. How would you think about 2023 net adds for MAUs and premium subscribers relative to your performance in ’22? What are some of the puts and takes here?

Paul Vogel : So obviously, we don’t give 2022 guidance anymore. I think what we said in my outset is we expect really strong growth. Obviously, on the MAU side, ’22 was a real outlier in terms of how much we outperformed. But we see this often where we have some years where we over-index on MAU or we over index on subs, and it can change even throughout the year in terms of how we’re trending. I would say, in general, any time we’re growing MAUs, the way we are, it’s always a really good sign of the business, the health of the business and the health of the future subscriber growth for Spotify as well. So, we’re not giving guidance, but I would say we feel really good about the momentum as we exit 2022. We feel good about the guidance for Q1 and how we’re trending.