Spotify leads the music streaming market

Relaxnews

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, took to Twitter to announce that the world’s leading music streaming site has topped 40 million paid subscribers — a new record. Spotify now counts more than twice as many paid users as its main rival, Apple Music, which has already signed up 17 million subscribers in just over a year.
This new record is the fruit of spectacular 33% growth in just six months for Spotify, suggesting that music streaming services — which offer subscribers unlimited music for around $10 a month — are now firmly rooted in the habits of internet users. In fact, including its non-Premium subscribers, Spotify counts some 100 million active users. Since its launch in fall 2008, the platform has paid out over $3 billion in royalties.
Although far behind, Apple Music still shows promising growth, already boasting 17 million subscribers just 15 months since launch. One key difference with Spotify is that Apple’s service doesn’t offer a free version. This in turn makes its growth even more impressive. Apple has adopted an aggressive strategy to boost its platform’s popularity, bagging exclusives for the latest albums from Drake (“Views”), Frank Ocean (“Blonde”) and Britney Spears (“Glory”).
Spotify’s historic rival Deezer no longer holds much weight in the market. Now 50% owned by a Russian-American investment fund, Deezer has just 6 million paid subscribers.
The Tidal platform may be full of ambition but it has perhaps aimed too high and arrived a little too late to the party. Bought at the beginning of 2015 by Jay-Z, Tidal prides itself in offering Hi-Fi audio in lossless quality, as well as HD videos. It announced just over four million subscribers at the beginning of summer 2016. Since its launch, a multitude of artists — including big names like Taylor Swift, Madonna, Kanye West, Rihanna, Daft Punk and, of course, Beyoncé — have teamed with Jay-Z to bring exclusive content to the service, although this hasn’t yet translated into the desired level of success. In fact, the site is now losing a lot of money and rumors of a buy-out are rife.
Other services include Pandora, well known in the USA, with four million subscribers to its One package. It is difficult to estimate the number of subscribers to Google Play Music, Amazon Prime Music and SoundCloud Go, as these platforms haven’t released any figures. Still, no service is yet making money from the venture, as all platforms have to pay out around 80% of their revenue in royalties.