This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on February 10th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.
They compete with the world’s most powerful companies. Yet Spotify keeps setting the terms in the market. There is a simple explanation for why — and it gives the music giant room to charge more.
A couple of times a year, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook takes to the stage and promises the company’s best product ever. The world watches as the tech giant unveils yet another new iPhone — often strikingly similar to last year’s. It is a spectacle that signals total dominance.
Having Apple as a competitor might sound like a nightmare. In most categories, it probably is. But not when it comes to music. And Spotify has found a weapon the tech giants find hard to counter.
The result of that was visible in the strong quarterly report released on Tuesday. Spotify beat analysts’ expectations on both revenue and profit.
The key metric EPS — earnings per share — was particularly strong, rising 40 percent compared with the previous quarter. Looking at the previous year, it rose a full 189 percent. The picture of a company currently in control of its market was cemented. A strong report for the company’s newly installed co-CEOs, Alex Norström and Gustav Söderström.
One of the few pieces of news since they took over is a price increase for subscriptions in the US and a couple of smaller markets. Such a move should be almost impossible to pull off when you have some of the world’s largest and best-capitalised companies working against you. Apple, Amazon, and Google-owned YouTube have no shortage of money. They could afford to lose money through price competition for years without any problem. But they do not act accordingly.
Because despite all of this, Spotify remains the global market leader in the segment. Spotify has less money, but it also has something the tech giants lack: focus.
Apple Music sits well down the priority list for Apple, for example. Looking at the business area “Services,” it accounts for around 25 percent of the company’s total revenues. Apple Music is included there, but the category also contains the entire App Store — which most likely accounts for the bulk of the earnings.
Services like iCloud and Apple Pay also sit within this division. How much priority can something get when — very generously estimated — it accounts for a couple of percentage points of Apple’s revenues?
Looking at Amazon, the picture is similar. The music service Amazon Music is included in “Subscription services” and is not reported separately. Among these subscriptions, the Prime services are by far the largest — the engine of Amazon’s e-commerce and media empire. How many customers associate Amazon with music? Probably very few.
The biggest threat to Spotify most likely comes from YouTube, as audio and video begin to overlap in many categories. Spotify itself has launched video in its service, and podcasts are increasingly broadcast with video. Here YouTube has a strong starting position given how popular music as a category is for them. But YouTube Music as a standalone service is no great success.
The market data is not perfect, but it suggests that Spotify has roughly as large a market share as Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music combined.
The analysis is clear: music is a side business for the tech giants.
The risks for Spotify therefore lie primarily in losing the focus mentioned above. In recent days the company announced it would start selling physical books through the app — as an extension of the earlier push into audiobooks. A great deal of other new things outside music have also been added. Video and podcasts have been pushed at various points over the years.
What is missing is the major push specifically in music. Sure, there is an AI DJ that helps with track selection, and the quality of the audio has also improved. But many challenges remain to be solved. AI-generated songs are flooding the platform, and the difficulty of finding what to listen to persists.
Spotify is perfectly positioned to solve these. But one must hope they do not spend too much time looking at their competitors’ rather vague strategies in the music field.
Keep the focus, and the price increases — and the dominance on the streaming market — can continue.
