Guess Which Streaming Service is Favoured by Young Music Fans? Nope, Not That One

There is a myriad of choices when it comes to streaming music: Spotify, YouTube, Google Play, Amazon (for some, anyway), Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer, Napster and a few others. The big dog is Spotify (for audio only) and YouTube (for, well, everything). But when you break things down by demographic, the data presents something unexpected.

Of the Big Three, Apple Music is the least popular streaming music service in the US. Much that can be attributed to the fact that most of its competitors have a free tier or, in the case of YouTube, entirely free. But when you look at services that require a subscription, Apple Music starts to look like a winner.

It’s expected that Apple will announce at their iPhone event on Tuesday that Apple Music will have broken through the 30 million mark for paid subscribers, which would put it behind just first-place Spotify. And who’s driving that growth? As 9to5Mac points out, it’s young listeners.

Apple fares much better when you look at those who choose to pay for a music streaming service. There, Apple has the same popularity as Spotify among those aged 35+, and is significantly more popular with both Millennials (25-34) and Gen Z (18-24).

There are some handy graphs that illustrate this here. And it when it comes to iOS users, Apple Music is not surprisingly, way ahead of everything else.