And they are also doing just fine without it.
Not on a P&L level they aren't. While they have far and away the most paid subs, they are still losing huge money every quarter, and that's only tolerable for so long.
I'd think Spotify having long ago exited the "start-up" stage would have found a way to be at least close to profitable by now, but they aren't, their Q1 2023 earnings call saw another gigantic loss of $156 million, that following a $231 million loss for Q4 2022.
They did print a bunch of money with their IPO of course, but if the street ever turns on them that cash cow could be milked dry at some point, as it shouldn't be so damn hard to make money on a $3 billion business.
Amazon and Apple very well may also lose a lot on their music businesses, they don't report that information, but they can also tolerate that for pretty much any foreseeable future, where Spotify cannot.
While Rhapsody was the first modern streaming service, Spotify dates back to 2006 and had a huge head start on Amazon/Apple in the market. In that sense their paid subs numbers aren't all that impressive, with Amazon and Apple more than nipping at their heels despite joining the party relatively late in the game. Many of Spotify's management choices look suspect, excepting the decision to float a "direct listing" IPO that exchanged 30 million shares on day one.
I wonder if one day Spotify will be forced to kill their "free" (ad supported) tier, as even though the paid tier is huge, it has never been able to cover all of their other losses, and losing hundreds of millions of dollars a quarter can't go on forever. If Spotify's UI/UX, library, recommendation algorithm, etc is really all that and a bag of chips, it ought to be able to stand on its own. That free tier no doubt cannibalizes the paid tier to some extent, so unless they can just keep raising the price on the advertisers to better offset their operating loss, I imagine they might one day have to kill that freebie service.
I'd also be curious about the % of their losses attributable to music, vs. podcasts, vs. audiobooks.