Spotify U.S. Subscriber Growth Is Sluggish Ahead of Price Bumps

Spotify added a relatively modest number of North American subscribers during Q3 2025. Photo Credit: Lucas van Oort

Despite expanding its subscriber base by 11.5% during Q3 2025, Spotify is still grappling with sluggish paid-user growth in North America. Given the platform’s reported plans to again bump U.S. pricing – and its loosened free-tier restrictions – will that growth flip to a contraction in the new year?

It will, of course, be a while until we have a definite answer to the important question. But as things stand, we aren’t without evidence of Spotify’s Premium plateau in North America; DMN Pro has explored the service’s (and the wider music streaming space’s) stateside subscriber-growth slowdown in detail.

And according to the company’s third-quarter earnings, the trend didn’t let up during July, August, and September 2025. All told, Spotify subscribers averaged out at 281 million during Q3 – up from 252 million in Q3 2024 for the above-noted 11.5% YoY improvement.

Factoring based on the DSP’s region-specific subscription-share percentages, North America therefore accounted for about 70.25 million Spotify subs during Q3 2025.

Though the sum is strong in its own right – see DMN Pro’s breakdown of leading music services’ U.S. market shares – its net growth from Q3 2024, 2.21 million, reflects a comparatively modest 3.25% uptick.

Noticeably smaller than Spotify’s overall subscriber-growth rate, this YoY boost nevertheless has a clear edge on its quarter-over-quarter counterpart. Between Q2 and Q3 2025, Spotify’s North American subscribers total grew by closer to 1.81%, the relevant figures show.

In short, then, Spotify’s subscription results aren’t quite ideal in North America. And in the U.S., the business’s across-the-board revenue, from free and paid offerings alike, rose less than 1% YoY during Q3 2025 to finish at $1.82 billion/€1.59 billion.

Enter the initially mentioned U.S. price increases, which haven’t yet been confirmed but, per reports and evidence, appear likely to arrive sooner rather than later.

On the evidence front, the subscriber plateau is hitting established markets generally – not only the States. As such, Spotify has already emphasized plans to up prices in tandem with the release of new features and moved forward with raises in the U.K., Switzerland, and elsewhere.

New features (messaging and upgraded audio among them) or not, it doesn’t seem impossible for the potential stateside pricing recalibration to fuel a bit of churn. In the first place, rivals including Apple Music have stayed put on pricing in the States while simultaneously adding fresh features and exclusives of their own.

Perhaps just as pressingly, Spotify in September loosened its free-tier restrictions – rendering the ad-supported plan more appealing to cost-conscious subscribers.

Needless to say, another round of price jumps could bolster that appeal and compel users to trade a monthly charge for a few in-app adverts.

Far from being unaware of the likely outcome, execs are presumably preparing to capitalize on it en route to righting the advertising ship. And those efforts, which will look to reverse the continued advert-revenue declines that have accompanied huge user additions and global ad-spending growth, are a different discussion altogether.

More immediately, Spotify stock (NYSE: SPOT), having scored a couple more bullish targets (one for $860) post-earnings, is holding steady at around $620 per share – for a 9% slip from early October and a 36% spike from the top of 2025.

While execs and insiders haven’t reported any recent SPOT trades, the company itself yesterday confirmed repurchasing 500,000 shares during the third quarter.