Spotify monthly active users

Spotify signed up more people to listen to playlists between 2015 and 2022, and the FAA licensed more rockets to leave the ground, and the two curves have walked together (r = 0.958) with an even energy that suggests both are subscription businesses, if you squint. The monthly active listener and the monthly Falcon 9. Both deliver payloads of a kind.

Spotify's MAUs grew from 77 million in 2015 to over 515 million by 2022, adding a Duolingo's worth of users every few months; FAA commercial space launches grew from 9 to 87 per year in the same window, with SpaceX responsible for the overwhelming majority of the increase. Both rely on compounding user/customer networks — streaming playlists begets more streaming, cheap launches beget more satellites to launch — and both reached the point where the underlying infrastructure became nearly invisible to the end user. Somewhere above our heads, a Starlink dish transmits Spotify.

A playlist queues. A booster returns to the drone ship. Both are, now, routine enough to ignore.