Music Ally

It’s Quarterly Results Week all week here on Music Ally, and yesterday Spotify released its Q2 results, with some notable big-number-goes-up highlights. Firstly, a sizeable threshold was crossed: Premium subscriber numbers grew 9% YoY to 300 million, with 7m net additions. Monthly Active Users (MAUs) climbed 12% YoY to 777 million, of which ad-supported MAUs grew 14% YoY to reach 494m. Total revenue went up 15% YoY (constant currency) to €4.8 billion.

ABOUT AIMS We build AI technology for music search and discovery. Our clients include most of the leading music companies in the world, from majors to independent labels and publishers. We’re entirely self-funded and profitable, operating as a fully remote team of music and tech lovers based all over the world. THE OPPORTUNITY Music search for sync is where our technology was built and proven.

Here’s a fascinating and slightly saddening report from US market research and analytics company The Harris Poll that reveals that half of Gen Z adults experience “weekend loneliness” – the highest of any generation in the 4,700 people it polled. Only 20% of Gen Z-ers “feel deeply connected and fulfilled in my relationships” and 49% of them say they don’t have enough friends to spend time with in-person.

Quarterly Financials Season is starting to reach its thrilling crescendo, and later today, Spotify will have its earnings call for the Q2 2026 financial results – which will bundle in updates on the platform’s Monthly Active Users, subscriber growth and perhaps some product launches and other announcements. Stay tuned for those details tomorrow, financials fans – but in the meantime, what do people expect will be in those results… and how are they trying to make money from their guesses?

Trebel Music is one of the more interesting streaming platforms, in that it offers licensed music listening (and even offline play) for free – in exchange for a gamified ad-based model: users watch ads or interact with brands, accrue points, and use those points to listen to music.

After the excitement of this week’s UMG quarterly results which saw the key numbers go up (and yet saw the share price go down 25%), WMG was due to announce its official earnings on Thursday this week. But – finance surprise! – it is moving that date to tomorrow (Wednesday 4 August), and has already released some preliminary data. Why?

On Sunday 2 August, the EU Artificial Intelligence Act was beefed-up – with a set of key consumer-facing transparency rules, AI compliance requirements, and regulatory enforcement powers all coming into force. There are a lot of facets to this act, and in terms of it impacting you or your work, it’s most likely that it will affect the tools you are already using – but there are some key ways in which it may affect the music industry.

Former Spotify chief economist Will Page has been ruminating in the Financial Times on how gig-goers are doing something that feels counter-intuitive: in a time of financial pressure, they are scrambling to attend expensive stadium shows – and artists like Harry “12 nights at Wembley” Styles are responding with long residency runs.

SoundCloud has launched a music discovery show that features songs and spoken contextual info from the platform’s music experts. The Upload is introduced as a “weekly music TL;DR from SoundCloud’s music discovery team,” and the platform says that it’s designed to “combat algorithmic fatigue” and “put human curation back into music discovery”.

On Friday, Music Ally South Asia reported that Indian legacy label Tips Music’s revenue grew 21% year-on-year to Rs106.5 crore (approximately $11.1 million) while profit after tax decreased 4% to Rs43.9 crore ($4.6 million) during the first quarter of FY2027.