Blog: music subscribers

The music industry’s growing obsession with declining ARPU will continue to colour the outlook for the global streaming market in revenue terms, but the positive driver of this equation is the rapid growth of music subscribers.

WWDC would have been a perfect opportunity for Apple to announce another streaming milestone for Apple Music. It didn’t but the good news is that MIDiA already have a figure for Apple Music, as part of our latest music subscriber market shares.

Neatly ahead of Spotify’s Q4 earnings, Amazon has taken the rare step of announcing subscriber metrics for Amazon Music (inclusive of Prime Music and Music Unlimited). Amazon Music closed 2019 with 55 million ‘customers’ across free and paid.

Q3 2019 was a quarter of mixed fortunes for Spotify, with its subscriber base displaying consistent growth, podcasts making a solid early showing, emerging markets demonstrating promise but ad revenue falling short.

Today marks 40 years since the passing of Elvis Presley. Whilst ‘The King’s’ emergence has come to represent a cultural year zero for the music industry, his icon status in recent years has taken a hit.

Pricing has long been an issue for streaming music subscriptions, with the $/€/£ 9.99 price point above what most people spend on music each month. Streaming services have navigated around the issue with a combination of tactics such as telco bundles and aggressive price discounts (e.

2015 was a big year for streaming music but it was a bigger deal for streaming video, generating $16 billion in revenue compared to $4.5 billion for streaming music. (Both figures are retail values). The contrast between the two streaming markets is pronounced: Streaming Video: Exclusives are a standard part of video services Streaming Music: Virtually all of the same 30 million songs are available everywhere Streaming Video: Rights are fragmented across a host of TV networks and studios Streaming Music: 3 labels account for the majority of rights Streaming Video: Subscribers are just as likely to be male or female and have relatively even age distribution Streaming Music: Subscribers are predominately male and under 45 Streaming Video: Services compete on price, content proposition and functionality Streaming Music: Services largely operate within the same price point and content Streaming Video: Video services are profitable (Netflix has a 32.

The music industry has long been viewed as a canary in the mine for how media industries transition into the digital era. In many respects that role has now been outlived. Book publishers quickly realised that after a few short years they had moved beyond where the labels had got to in 10.

Although the relatively early stage of development of the streaming market means that most listening habits are not yet being changed, there are fundamental shifts emerging among streamers and subscribers that point to the future of music consumption: Subscribers are fickle listeners: 58% of subscribers report listening to individual albums and tracks just a few times while 60% are doing this more than they used to because they are discovering so much new music.