Words
Nick Davie
Published
Reading Time
4 Min Read
When Spotify launched in Sweden in October 2008, the global recorded music industry was in trouble. Revenues had collapsed from a 1999 peak of around $25 billion to under $17 billion. Piracy had broken the business model, album sales were dying, and no one had a credible answer to either problem. Music itself was fine. The industry around it was not.
What followed is one of the more substantial cultural recoveries of the century. Global recorded music revenue reached $29.6 billion in 2024, a tenth consecutive year of growth, with paid streaming subscribers worldwide passing 752 million. Spotify alone paid the music industry more than $11 billion in 2025, the highest figure of any retailer on record. The bridge from broken industry to record-breaking decade runs straight through one company.
Spotify did not just save the business. It changed how music is listened to. Discover Weekly, launched in July 2015, took algorithmic personalisation out of the lab and turned it into a Monday morning ritual for hundreds of millions of people. Niche genres started finding audiences without label budgets behind them. Bad Bunny became Spotify's most streamed artist in the world three years running without ever needing to crossover into English. Burna Boy, BTS, Olivia Rodrigo and Ice Spice all owe a meaningful share of their reach to a feed that knew them before the radio did. Music stopped being an album you bought and became a soundtrack that follows you, room to room, hour to hour, mood to mood.
That is the playbook Spotify is now bringing to fitness.
On 27 April, the company launched a Fitness category for Premium subscribers, anchored by a partnership with Peloton that drops more than 1,400 on-demand classes into the app at no extra cost. The hub is live in nine markets, including the US, UK, Australia, Germany and Canada. Strength, cardio, yoga, meditation and audio-guided outdoor runs are all included. Peloton's senior instructors Rebecca Kennedy, Ally Love and Rad Lopez front the catalogue. Free users get a curated wellness shelf featuring Chloe Ting, Yoga with Kassandra and Pilates Body by Raven, among others. Premium users get the lot, ad-free.
Spotify finished Q1 2026 with 761 million monthly active users and 293 million Premium subscribers, both records. The company's own data says nearly 70 per cent of Premium subscribers already work out at least monthly. Roman Wasenmüller, Spotify's VP and Global Head of Podcasts, is leading the build, which is the same desk that turned podcasts into a multi-billion-dollar content category. "We are expanding Spotify to become a true daily wellness companion," he said in the launch statement.
For Peloton, the deal is the cleanest fit going. CEO Peter Stern, the former Apple Services and Ford Integrated Services lead who took the role in January 2025, has been retooling the company around content distribution rather than hardware ownership. Subscription is now 62 per cent of Peloton's top line, and Spotify's reach is the biggest single distribution gain Peloton has ever made. "Spotify provides a global stage for our instructors," Stern said. The instructors were always the asset. The bike was the delivery mechanism.
Fitness in 2026 looks a lot like music looked in 2008. Fragmented. Friction-heavy. Beloved by everyone but commercially organised around hardware rather than habit. The online fitness market reached $36.6 billion in 2026 and is forecast to compound to $311.9 billion by 2034. Apple Fitness+, Nike Training Club, Lululemon Studio and Equinox+ have all built loyal but contained audiences. None of them are inside the daily app the user already opens.
Spotify is.
Peloton's Chief Commercial Officer Dion Camp Sanders framed the consumer logic neatly. "The best workout is the one you actually do." He could just as easily have been describing Spotify's relationship with music since 2008. The song you actually listen to is the one already in your hand. The class will follow.
Spotify Fitness is available now. Premium subscribers in the US, UK, Australia, Germany, Austria, Canada, Mexico, Sweden and Spain get the full Peloton library, ad-free. Free users get the curated wellness shelf and creator content. Open the app and look for the Fitness category.
