Fly Intel: What to watch in Spotify earnings report

Spotify (SPOT) is scheduled to report results of its third quarter before market open on Thursday, November 1, with a conference call scheduled for 8:00 am ET. What to watch: 1. USER METRICS: Spotify’s monthly active users, or MAUs, are a measure of its popularity and growth potential. In the second quarter, Spotify reported 180M MAUs, up 30% year-over-year, and 101M ad-supported MAUs, up 23% year-over-year. In addition, the company reported that Premium Subscribers grew to 83M, up 40% year-over-year. Watch for updated numbers in the report, as well as management commentary on user engagement. 2. GUIDANCE: With its last report, Spotify guided to Q3 revenue of EUR1.2B-EUR1.4B, up 17%-36% year-over-year. The guidance included a negative impact of approximately EUR30M from foreign exchange rates. The company also forecast Q3 total MAUs of 188M-193M, up 25%-29% year-over-year, and total Premium Subscribers of 85M-88M, up 36%-43% year-over-year. 3. INITIATIVES AND PARTNERSHIPS: Since the company’s direct listing in April, the company has taken on a number of initiatives and formed partnerships to attract consumers and improve user experience. In July, Spotify announced a new beta feature that gives artists, labels and teams an easy way to submit unreleased music directly to the company’s editorial team for playlist consideration. Spotify said that everyone, whether an artist, label, manager, or part of an artist’s team, can try out this new feature by simply logging into Spotify for Artists or heading over to Spotify Analytics. In August, Spotify announced a music streaming partnership with Samsung (SSNLF) with chief executive officer Daniel Ek saying, “This partnership with Samsung reduces the friction for users to get Spotify up and running on multiple Samsung devices once the accounts have been linked. It allows us to create a seamless music listening experience together for the user that would be hard for either of us to build alone.” Additionally in August, Spotify and Nielsen (NLSN) announced an expansion of their relationship to include the adoption of Nielsen Brand Effect across Spotify in the U.S., Germany, Canada, Mexico, U.K., Spain, France, Netherlands, Japan and Australia.