Some fascinating new stats about what’s going on in the world of streaming
Streaming is big and getting bigger. Here’s the latest.
- Thanks to the pandemic, the number of subscriptions–people actually paying for Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal or whatever–has risen 35% year-over-year. That’s the pandemic at work.
- Spotify is in the lead with 35% of all paid subscriptions, followed by Apple with 19%, Amazon Music at 15%, China’s Tencent with 11% (and that’s mostly just in China), and YouTube Music with 6%. The remaining 14% is divided up amongst Napster, Deezer, Tidal, Quboz, and the rest of them.
- 1.6 million artists have made their music available to stream over the past year.
- About 1%–16,000 artists–suck up 90% of all streams.
- Expand that to 10%–160,000 artists–and you can account for 99.4% of all streams. That leaves just 0.6% for the remaining 1.44 million artists. No wonder so many have trouble making money from streaming.
Meanwhile, Spotify is busy with a couple of things.
- One of the big knocks against Spotify is that they’re missing a chance to get into High-Resolution Audio in order to appeal to audiophiles. Tidal, Deezer, and a couple of others already offer this. But now we hear that Spotify is looking at something they call “3D Audio.” This isn’t any kind of surround-sound format, but one with greater resolution (i.e. higher bitrates) and greater spatial perceptions.
- Spotify is also tweaking its algorithms to include a “nostalgia” component. It will look at your age and listening history and then recommend older songs it believes will trigger some nostalgia in you.
