Source: Simon Owens's Media Newsletter
Spotify's advertising revenue growth has stalled despite a massive listener base. The company lacks the first-party data infrastructure that makes YouTube and Meta's ad products valuable to marketers at scale. Without solving for contextual relevance, brand safety, and measurable ROI on audio, Spotify remains a premium inventory play rather than a core advertising platform. It competes on price rather than precision targeting, a dynamic that compresses margins as it attempts to close the gap with social and search competitors.