Digital Music in 2019

While Vinyl and CD usage is on the rise the definitive shift to digital music consumption and MP3 music is probably here to stay. I think it's interesting to look at some of the statistics related to digital music.

NOTE: Vinyl is poised to overtake CD's sales first time since 1986. From mid-year sales report the stats are as follows : $224.1 million earned by Vinyl and $247.9 million earned by CD sales.

Key Spotify Statistics

• 217 monthly active Spotify users
• 100 million of these are Spotify Premium subscribers
• Spotify’s posses 36% of the global streaming market
• Users listen to averege 41 unique artists per week
• Averege user spends around 25 hours on spotify per week
• 44% of users listen to Spotify every day
• Spotify have a library of 40 mln mp3 songs

Spotify have 100mln premium users. This is up from 96mln from Q4 of 2018. Digital distribution accounts for 92% of music industry revenue.

Source: Spotify

With Spotify dominance it's easy to forget other players on the market - let's briefly talk about them.

Apple Music

Spotify biggest competitor sports an impressive 60 mln worldwide users. While still behind globally, Apple Music recently surpassed Spotify in USA - in no small part thanks to the popularity of iPhone in US soil and the consequential inclination of iPhone users to use the in-house streaming solution.

Amazon Music

It may not seem so to a bystander but Amazon Music is fast becoming a dark horse of streaming services. With it huge number of clients and prime members it's easy for Amazon to show the ads for it's side service - like Amazon Music. Unconfirmed number of subscribers was reported to be of 30 mln but it's uncertain how that number was calculated as Prime Music have different tiers for paying members.

Honorable Mention - Napster

What happened to infamous napster ? Napster to many was the very very early version of spotify. In a way it was the first digital music platform. After it's short lived illegal career (1999-2001) as mp3 music downloader it now became a service similar to spotify offering a premium subscription for listening to ad free music in streaming.

While the name is still well known the service market share at 2% is minuscule compared to spotify 52%.

Being a musician in digital era

A topic for another article but wanted to briefly break down how much are the streaming platforms paying to artists.

All digital platforms pay the artist on "per stream" basis, meaning the artist gets paid every time someone listens to their song. Sounds good but the payout depends on the country of the listener. As these services runs on ads - listeners from richer countries are worth much more to publishers.

Here is a quick breakdown of payouts per stream (USA market)

Spotify - $0.00437 per stream

Apple Music - $0.00783 per stream

Amazon Music - $0.00402 per stream

Google Play Music - $0.00676 per stream

Napster $0.019 - per stream

Tidal $0.01284 - per stream

As it stands right now in order to earn $1000 you'll need around

• 230k listens on Spotify
• 130k listens on Apple Music
• 250k listens on Amazon Music
• 150k listens on Google Play Music
• 52k listens on Napster
• 77k listens on Tidal

Obviously there's no reason for not being on all platforms at the same time.