To put the enormity of “fake artist” popularity into context, acts whose entire catalogs have fewer chart-eligible Spotify streams than 1.22 billion include: Beyoncé, John Legend, One Direction, Childish Gambino, Lorde and Meek Mill. Spotify listeners frequently turn to the streaming service to soundtrack special occasions. Breaking down streaming services by operating system gives some unsurprising results. This is expected to increase over 2020, however, with Q2 2020 loss estimated at €45-95 million ($49-103 million). It does not have the run of the market, however. Tencent Music logs an impressive 11%, despite its heavy domestic focus (where it is split over a suite of four apps), while YouTube clocks 6%. Note that we’ve converted Spotify ARPU from euros into dollars for the entire period at April 2020 exchange rates. Followers of content and context playlists on Spotify. Spotify data showed that between 2014 and 2017, the average listener increased the number of unique artists to whom they listened by 37% from 30 to 41 per week. For many years the most-played artist of the year was an arms race between Drake and Ed Sheeran. Marketplace | News & Insights | Data | Events. This is more due to an increased share of Spotify MAUs in Latin America (increasing from 19% to 22%) and particularly the rest of the world (more than doubling from 7% to 16%). Sheeran and Justin Bieber are the only artists to feature in the top-10 tracks twice, reflecting the very real dominance enjoyed on Spotify by a relatively limited number of artists. Apple and Pandora have lost market share since H1 2018 by this estimation, despite adding users while Amazon has gained slightly. This compares to 50 million in Europe, 25 million in Latin America, and 12 million in the rest of the world (nb. Spotify most-played lists tend to be dominated by the same handful of artists. Streams are counted in Spotify for Artists when a song is streamed for over 30 seconds. You might also be able to access your performance data with Spotify For Artists. Number of artists to which average Spotify user listens. Given most artists would struggle to make a living from such rates, it’s clear that Spotify’s model does not take artist income into account. The other, of course, will be the rise of Apple Music as a key rival. Don’t forget, it’s possible that all of the music attributed to the names above is, behind the scenes, actually written and/or performed by the same person. While musicians have certainly been hurt, at least the current model at least acknowledges that we should pay to listen to music if we can. These scores are reflective of the far higher level of comfort with streaming among younger users. Notably Budden signed a contract with Spotify in 2018, which sees the former rapper adhere to a twice-weekly schedule. Prices have been up and down since then, standing at $144.49 in early May 2020. You’ll see a “—” when looking at your stats in Spotify for Artists for a few reasons: The best place to see the latest Spotify Chart figures is at spotifycharts.com. This gives us a Spotify market cap of $26.87 billion. By using our website you agree to our use of cookies in accordance with our cookie policy. When it comes to the most-followed artists, Sheeran again takes it, with 62.9 million followers (as of late April 2020) – which would qualify as one of the world’s 25 most-populous countries, ahead of Italy. The two wanted to create a legal digital music platform to respond to growing challenge of online music piracy in the early 2000s. Perhaps new users are more inclined to the popular music side of the spectrum, or we’re seeing an increase in businesses using Spotify for background music. Spotify stock price has been fairly tumultuous since then, rising to a high of $192.38 in July 2018, but coming down fairly hard from late September onwards. Regional figures from GlobalWebIndex dating from H2 2018 give us slightly lower totals, with no region quite reaching the 148 minute mark: This is a high figure, though if we assume users put on music every day in the background, it’s not inconceivable. An anticipated new feature called Spotify Tastebuds will facilitate social music discovery through users’ friends. Both come closer to parity than Pandora, for which close to six in 10 listeners were female. Spotify was founded in 2006 in Stockholm, Sweden, by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. Drake (naturally) is second on 46.4 million (nearly as many people as live in Spain), and Ariana Grande comes third by virtue of her 45 million fans (more than, say, Argentina). Over 4 billion playlists exist on the platform, according to Spotify itself. Spotify has a “pyramid” of around 500 Latin playlists, through which songs usually must work their way before reaching the pinnacle of ¡Viva Latino! This $179 Robot Vacuum Has 30,000 Reviews and is a Quarter of the Price of a Roomba, listed 50 artists we suspected were fictional. Ed Sheeran may not have topped the list for a couple of years, but he yet to be ejected from the top-five, occupying fourth in 2019. YouTube does not feature here, presumably folded in ‘others’. Further breaking down US Spotify users by age, we see, as with so many apps, that younger demographics dominate. In 2017 Spotify singed a deal to pay a minimum of $2 billion to two undisclosed labels (thought to be Universal and Merlin) in order to be able to negotiate better rates for itself. Confirming what was found above, we see that Spotify has the most youthful user base of the three platforms, with over half of users aged 34 or under, compared with 40% of Apple and 39% of Pandora users. Fast-forward to the streaming-dominated music industry of 2019, and Rotten’s pugnacious kiss-off doesn’t only sound depressingly prophetic – it’s actually become a business model. The article suggests that the prevailing trends would resulted in ARPU going below $5. In order to get Spotify off the ground initially, shares in the company were given to the aforementioned labels, plus EMI. 30 seconds is deemed to be the cut off point to determine whether or not a user is enjoying a suggested track. US Spotify users by age and gender vs Apple Music and Pandora. Otherwise Spotify subscriber growth has been proportionally even. Moving to new and emerging trends, we saw Modern Bollywood the breakout genre (reflecting the move into India), and Lil Nas X, Lizzo, and Lunay the breakout artists. This can happen in one of two ways: Head to Songs in Spotify for Artists to see the number of times each of your songs have been saved. We might note both services offer ad-supported free options, which no doubt went some way to facilitating this crossover. Claims to democratize the music industry have also been questioned, with the world’s biggest four music labels responsible for 87% of content available on Spotify. Playlisting expert Kieron Donoghue recently spotted that Sony Music had launched a suspicious “mood” playlist on Spotify and Apple Music – “Sleep & Mindfulness Thunderstorms” – via the company’s Filtr brand. Unfair or not, with the days of physical music long behind us (with the exception of vinyl junkies), Spotify dominates the way we consume music in the 21st century. The hypothesis, later confirmed, was that many of these artists were, in fact, “fake” (i.e. In terms of operating margin, Spotify remains in the red, though a deficit of €17 million ($18 million) and negative margin of 0.9% represents a quarter-on-quarter improvement on Q4 2019’s deficit of €77 million ($83 million) at 4.1% and a year-on-year improvement on Q1 2019’s deficit of €47 million ($51 million) and negative margin of 3.1%. Spotify ARPU has been declining – to the chagrin of some invested parties (namely: record labels). Spotify went public in April 2018, listing on the New York Stock Exchange, opting for a direct listing instead of the standard IPO process. These losses have hit shareholder earnings, with earnings per share coming in -€0.20 (-$0.22), albeit this is an improvement on Q1 2019’s -€0.79 (-$0.86). Only people who have been given access can see your detailed stats. IFPI figures do not break out figures by platform, but we can make our own calculations based on what we know. Ariana Grande was the top female artist, followed by Dua Lipa, Cardi B, Taylor Swift, and Camila Cabello. They also hear about your upcoming concerts in our concert recommendation emails, on the homescreen of their Spotify app, and on their concerts page which features a list of upcoming concerts in their area. In April 2020, Spotify launched editorially-curated playlists, to mirror its hugely influential music playlists. On Spotify, “Sleep & Mindfulness Thunderstorms” contains over 990 tracks, adding up to more than 18 hours of audio, mainly consisting of continuous storm sounds chopped into minute-long consecutive segments. The power of the Spotify playlist cannot be understated. Streams are counted in Spotify for Artists when a song is streamed for over 30 seconds. According to Spotify data, streams of “Cielito Lindo”, an unofficial Mexican football anthem, increased by 1,854% after the national team’s historic victory over then defending champions Germany. Listeners have access to nearly the entire mainstream Western canon of music (and much from beyond it) available at a few clicks, in high quality. A more recent (2019) SoundCharts study looking at the average royalty payouts per stream reports that artists earn the considerably lower sum of $0.00318/stream on Spotify. Clearly users could find everything they wanted on these services. Both show small fluctuations in the period covered but there’s no real discernible major trend, beside slight divergence in 2019 as Netflix ARPU increased and Spotify ARPU decreased. Netflix, of course, delivers a very different service, and is also in the business of content creation and distribution. – “Sleep & Mindfulness Thunderstorms” – via the company’s Filtr brand. In May 2018, the Seeb remix of Mike Posner’s “I Took A Pill In Ibiza” became the 10th song to surpass one billion streams of Spotify. Post Malone was, however, second in 2018, followed by XXXTentacion (who died midway through the year), J Balvin, and Ed Sheeran, coming in a relatively (for him) poor fifth.