More than seven years after Spotify began operating in India, the country got some significant talk time during one of its presentations. At its Investor Day event in New York on 21 May, the first one the DSP has held since 2022, Gustav Gyllenhammar, vp of markets and subscriptions, said that Spotify is now “the leader in audio-streaming” in the territory where it was one of the ten major services when it launched at the end of February 2019 (though technically, YouTube Music arrived a couple of weeks later).  

Notably, four of those competitors—Google Play, Hungama Music, Resso and Wynk Music—have since shuttered while one, Gaana, has become a subscription-only platform. That leaves global rivals such as Amazon Music, Apple Music and YouTube Music along with local heavyweight JioSaavn, which also claims to be the market leader, with over 100m MAUs—though that figure has remained the same since 2019. 

Might we presume then that Spotify has crossed that milestone in India? Gyllenhammar did say that the nation “now sits alongside the US as one of our largest markets by MAUs”. According to Edison Research’s ‘The Infinite Dial’ report for last year, 35% of the US population listened to the service in February 2025—which would be approximately 120m people. 

Gyllenhammar also put a positive spin on the fact that less than 10% of Indian users are premium subscribers, framing it as an opportunity rather than a challenge. Subscriptions are now 7x the number they were in 2022 while more than 7% of new subscribers have opted for the recently-introduced Premium Platinum plan. These were encouraging signs that Spotify could eventually hit 150m subscribers in India, he said.

Investor Day also saw the announcements of a number of new features for premium users, including soon-to-go-live fan-made covers and remixes, personal podcasts (currently available for those in Ireland, Sweden and the US) and Reserved, through which concert tickets are pre-saved for superfans (though that will initially only be available in the US). Read about them here, here and here.