Key Financial Data
- Q4 Revenue: $2.19 billion (no change year-over)
- Q4 Net income: $99 million (-66%)
- Total subscribers, SiriusXM: 32.9 million (-1%)
- Net subscriber additions, SiriusXM: +110,000
- FY25 Revenue: $8.56 billion (-2%)
- FY25 Net income: $805 million (compared to -$2.08 billion in FY24)
- FY25 SiriusXM segment revenue: $6.42 billion (-2%)
- FY25 Pandora and off-platform revenue: $2.14 billion (no change)
- FY25 Advertising revenue, all units: $1.77 billion (no change)
- FY25 Subscriber CAC: $414 million (+12%)
- Read more Q4 2025 media earnings coverage
What is going on at SiriusXM?
For the past few years, the company has worked tirelessly to position its traditional satellite and streaming radio products as a premium offering, one that fans of music, sports, entertainment and news absolutely love once they try it in their cars or on their phones.
Well, as it turns out, most people can live without SiriusXM.
On Thursday, SiriusXM revealed yet another financial quarter where the premium audio company failed to break out above 34 million subscribers, with its satellite and streaming radio services seeing a 1 percent dip in customers to end 2025 with 32.9 million active accounts.
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After two years of trying to convince younger audio fans to shell out around $10 per month for its streaming app — which offers four times the number of linear content channels as the satellite radio service, plus on-demand features, podcasts and videos — SiriusXM did an about-face last year, choosing instead to focus on stickier, in-car customers, who pay considerably more for plans that couple satellite and streaming access.
Based on SiriusXM’s financials, it would appear most of those customers are sticking around, but the company isn’t adding new ones.
Perhaps the biggest reason is because SiriusXM is too expensive, in a sea of premium offerings that cost absolutely nothing to access. This is the era of podcasts, which are free to stream on platforms owned by Apple, Google, Amazon and Spotify. When it comes to radio, most people are fine with the offerings of AM and FM — and few people listen to those channels, either, with drivers choosing their phones over their tuners.
Competition for the ear is hot, and it will only get hotter. That is especially true in the car, where infotainment systems developed by TiVo parent Xperi and others are starting to gain momentum. Those systems offer more than audio — you can stream free, ad-supported TV channels with news, entertainment and sports. LiveOne, a streaming app that rose from the ashes of Slacker, is natively offered on Tesla cars; this week, Stingray’s TuneIn signed a deal with Nissan to be integrated into the radios of cars, trucks and SUVs hitting the road over the next few years.
SiriusXM’s attempt to compete with those products and others has been virtually non-existent. The company announced an ad-supported plan, called SiriusXM Play, that still isn’t available to everyone. On a conference call with investors Thursday, SiriusXM CEO Jennifer Witz said the company is conducting a “thoughtful rollout” of the Play plan. That’s a mistake — at a time when motorists and commuters have tons of free streaming options, SiriusXM Play’s rollout should be aggressive, not measured.
But Witz and other executives know SiriusXM is a fragile business. Of the $8.56 billion in revenue SiriusXM earned during 2025, $6.42 billion came from the satellite radio service. With advertising factored out, SiriusXM’s subscription fee revenue was $4.65 billion — nearly one-half of the company’s overall earnings.
Most of those customers are probably paying full price for the service, which can cost more than $25 per month with taxes and royalty fees factored in. (There are cheaper plans that offer fewer channels, and more-expensive plans that allow customers to listen on more than one radio, with other perks.) Only a handful of subscribers play the “threaten to cancel” game, which earns them retention rates that discount the cost of regular service by as much as 80 percent.
If even half of SiriusXM’s traditional radio subscribers switch to the ad-supported platform, that’s a big hit on revenue in the short-term. But it could strengthen other parts of the company, including its growing advertising business, which now reaches more than 170 million listeners across satellite, linear streaming, podcasts and Pandora.
Unfortunately for Wall Street, things aren’t looking positive in the short term. On Thursday, Witz said revenue is expected to remain flat, based on forecasts that indicate a slight uptick in satellite radio churn throughout the year.
“We are continuing to explore and capitalize on opportunities to leverage our assets moving forward, including our talent agreements, our ad sales expertise and ad tech, our 180 million vehicles in operation, and our 35 MHz of contiguous spectrum,” Witz said, without offering further details.
