Spotify has partnered with telecoms, newspapers, and others to provide bundled subscriptions -- inflating their "paid" subscriber amount.

A good chunk of those 50m aren't paying $10/mo; they've expanded their partnerships (in part) to inflate that number.

There's also Spotify family. I'm paying 15 USD for 5 (extended) family members. Dirt cheap. Discover weekly is amazing. Wish for the best for Spotify.

Very interesting. Can you give me some pointers on what kind of partnerships they have?

Every Starbucks barista (who's worked at Starbucks for some number of months) receives a free Spotify subscription, for example.

Here in Australia, Vodafone (a mobile carrier) have been bundling Spotify Premium with their contracts, for example: https://www.whistleout.com.au/MobilePhones/News/Vodafone-rev...

Interestingly Apple did a similar thing with Telstra (the largest, formerly state owned carrier), with a year free on 1 year contracts.

That has now become more of a free trial sort of deal though: https://www.telstra.com.au/applemusic

NYTimes All Access subscription ($5/week) includes a free year of Spotify premium.

The most recent one I heard was a partnership with the New York Times, which seems like an odd partnership to me:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/cheriehu/2017/02/13/spotify-new...

Here in the Philippines the major providers bundle Spotify with data plans. Also, a family subscription here is a fraction of what it was back home in the US (~P159 vs ~$10+)

In New Zealand, Spark (our largest telco, the ex-state monopoly) offers free Spotify with their mobile plans.

With Rogers in Canada some plans get Spotify free for 6 months.

And students at accredited universities in the US get half price($5.00) a month subscriptions.

I switched from Google Play Music to Spotify specifically because of Discover Weekly and the curated playlists that spotify hosts. I pretty much only listen to music from one of those two.

Conversely, the "daily mix" playlists seem to be utter crap for me.

Heh, it's the opposite for me. I rarely get anything out of Discover Weekly (just too random) but the daily mixes work well.

I like the daily mixes, possibly because I have hundreds of saved songs across dozens of playlists.

Discover weekly is great but Apple Music now has the same thing (My New Music Mix) and an additional 'My Favourites Mix' which is kind of a weekly playlist made up of songs they think you already like but haven't heard in a while and one or two songs you don't know but by artists you already like.

I think discover weekly is much more than that, and that is precisely what makes discover weekly so good!!

>> I think discover weekly is much more than that

I don't understand. The 'My New Music Mix' feature is exactly the same as Discover Weekly. It presents you a weekly playlist of music you don't know yet but might like based on your listening patterns. I've used both extensively (I have subscriptions to Apple Music and Spotify) and they do the same thing (although obviously with different algorithms).

> Anecdotally, discover weekly is a tremendous hit.

Would be nice to try, but it is restricted for me.