Spotify monthly active users

The world launched more satellites and Spotify added more monthly listeners between 2015 and 2023, and the two curves have risen together (r = 0.958) with the steady confidence of two companies that benefit from not being alone up there. A satellite joins the mesh; a user joins the playlist queue. Both, at this point, are counted in the billions, just at different units.

Worldwide satellite launches grew from about 221 in 2015 to over 2,400 by 2023, with Starlink dominating the line; Spotify's MAUs climbed from 77 million to over 550 million, absorbing podcast listening and audiobook distribution on the way. Both ride the same low-rates-era infrastructure build-out, and both illustrate how cheaply a decade-long scale-up can be financed if the marginal unit of customer acquisition or launch payload is low enough. Somewhere above North Dakota, a Starlink satellite now beams Spotify to a rancher, which feels like a sentence that needed to be written at some point.

A payload releases. A song begins. Both are now routine enough that we forget they are new.