Subscriptions Drove Nearly 80% of US Streaming Music Listening in H1 (Jul 5, 2017)

BuzzAngle, a company which tracks the North American music industry, has released a first-half 2017 report, with lots of numbers on music consumption patterns in the US over the past six months, and Variety here has a summary of some of the key findings. One of the most striking numbers to me is that subscription streams accounted for nearly 80% of total streaming audio plays in the first half, with ad-based streaming only driving 21% of listens. That was slightly surprising to me, because the number of ad-based streaming music users is much higher than the number of paid subscribers, so I went back and checked some earlier data from BuzzAngle in this year-end 2016 report. It appears that this balance began to shift dramatically starting in the middle of 2015, which is not coincidentally when Apple Music launched. Importantly, BuzzAngle treats streaming video plays of music (e.g. music videos on YouTube) as a separate category, so the split mentioned above only accounts for pure audio streaming such as Spotify’s free and paid tiers and their equivalents. But it’s still striking that the balance has gone from roughly 50/50 between subscription and free audio streaming at the beginning of 2015 to 80/20 in Q2 of this year. And in Q2, subscription audio streaming actually eclipsed combined ad-based audio and video streams for the first time, so it’s now the largest category even when video plays are included. It’s worth remembering that this is US data, and the US has shifted dramatically from being a streaming laggard to being a leader over the last few years, so this certainly isn’t reflective of global behavior. But it is worth noting that subscription music streaming not only provides the vast majority of revenue and profits in the US, but now also a majority of actual plays as well.

via Variety

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• Industry

• Advertising
• Music
• Streaming
• Subscriptions

• Streaming is Saving Music

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