A report by Media Research shows that the worldwide music streaming subscriptions grew by a whopping 26.4% in the 2nd quarter of 2021, now standing at 521.3 million subscribers at the end of that period, an increase of 109.5 million from 2020.
The study highlights that ‘SPOTIFY’ continues to be the market leader by a distance despite rival services emerging and eating up its market share. Spotify controls 31% of the global music streaming market, which is more than double of the number 2 in the list, Apple Music which has a 15% share.
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Next up are Amazon Music and Tencent Music, each with a 13% market share, while despite enjoying huge popularity in India, YouTube Music has only an 8% share of the global subscriptions. Apple Music has almost 78.6 million subscribers, while Amazon Music and Tencent Music have over 68.1 million each.
YouTube Music which is in 5th place has about 41.9 million subscribers to its credit.
Though it accounts for only 8% of the market share, YouTube Music is the fastest growing service for the 2nd time in a row. Mark Mulligan of Midia suggests that the reason behind it is that YouTube as a brand is deeply embedded in the minds of the people, especially younger millennial consumers. It has become a habit for some people and serves as a key platform for music and other kinds of video consumption.
Spotify is a leader with the biggest share of the market, even more than Apple Music and Amazon Music combined. The numbers indicate that Spotify is the choice of a maximum number of consumers using music streaming apps, no matter how many new services try to compete with it.
If we talk about Apple Music, its performance has also improved in 2021. Global streaming has risen, partly due to pandemic boredom. In the year 2020, Spotify and Apple Music saw a growth of 16.2% globally over 2019.
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However, with Spotify adding more subscribers than any other streaming service in the last 12 months up to the middle of 2021, “there is no risk of Spotify losing its leading position anytime soon,” claimed Midia’s Mark Mulligan. However, he also cautioned about the erosion of Spotify’s share as it had a 33% share at the same time a year before and 34% in 2019.
