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Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

azalemeth 5y ago
I have a huge and old MP3 library that is an amalgamation of my CDs, and some of my parent's CDs too. I think it's about two or three months of classical music. I suspect that many HN readers also have similar stories. None of this will show up in a market survey like this.
mickotron 5y ago
Deezer is awesome. The HiFi subscription has a lot of content at FLAC quality.
gfiorav 5y ago
Big surprise for me is Amazon music... with 13%! I don't know anyone that uses it. Maybe it's a regional thing?
- hwbehrens 5y ago
  My wife and I share a single Spotify account, so when she's listening, I switch to the free tier of Amazon Music. I wonder if that counts toward that 13%?
  - circa 5y ago
    There is a couples account option and I think its very close to the same price of a single sub. Edit: its called Spotify Duo and its $12.99 vs $9.99 https://www.spotify.com/us/premium/#plans https://www.spotify.com/us/premium/#plans
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  Does Amazon give out Music accounts as a bonus when users subscribe to some other service, similar to Amazon Prime customers getting streaming? Maybe that can account for incidental and not intentional subscribers.
  - salamandersauce 5y ago
    Yes they do. Prime comes with a limited version that "only" has a couple million songs. At least in some countries. They also have a higher tier called Music Unlimited that's more on-par with the other guys content wise but cheaper if you already sub to Prime. Also have a tier that only works on Echos but gives access to the larger catalog for even less. I switched to just using the included service with Prime. It's good enough for me and I get Prime super cheap as a student.
  - fullstop 5y ago
    Some purchases on Amazon come with "3 months of amazon music", which surely adds to their numbers.
- YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
  Anecdotal but my parents use the one integrated in prime because they mainly listen to old music.
- yumraj 5y ago
  It's free with Prime and cheaper than other alternates for the paid version if you have Prime. For casual listening it's not bad at all. It also supports so called HD and Ultra HD, which I believe Spotify still doesn't support, while Apple does.
  - paxys 5y ago
    It is not free with Prime, just $2 cheaper ($8 vs $10/mo). I think what is driving Amazon Music subscriptions is the proliferation of Echo devices. It is easy to auto-subscribe from the speaker itself (sometimes too easy, to the point of being accidental), e.g. when you ask it to play a song.
    - jasode 5y ago
      >It is not free with Prime, just $2 cheaper There's a free tier Amazon Music of 2 million songs included with Prime membership. That's the free music streaming my friend was using for 5+ years. She then upgraded to Amazon Music Unlimited for extra $80/year. Can't tell if the article's 13% for Amazon Music is counting the free tier users.
      - paxys 5y ago
        In that case every Prime member is a subscriber, and that number should be a lot larger.
        sofixa 5y ago
        Nah, I'm a Prime subscriber and get the occasional email from Amazon that i have an unused advantage from my subscription and should enable Amazon Music.
    - yumraj 5y ago
      As sibling comment also noted, there is a free tier that we've been using forever. They also have a much cheaper option for students, I think $1/month or something like that. Not sure if every Prime user uses Amazon Music, and how they count their user base.
- echelon 5y ago
  Long term, Spotify and Netflix are in trouble. Amazon and Apple are in this space, and they can use their trillion dollar market caps to decimate single-revenue stream companies. The Department of Justice should do something about this. Neither Amazon nor Apple should be in these businesses. They do too much and apply price pressure unfairly. If this continues, $1T+ tech will be the entire economy. Netflix, Spotify, and all of the other "little companies" should sue the ever-loving bejesus out of these monsters for anti-competitive practices.
  - nostromo 5y ago
    Increased competition is a good thing. I’m glad several companies are in this space. It’s only a problem if a single provider is a monopoly and uses that to squeeze out other companies in order to raise prices. We’re very far off from that because there are so many companies competing and none of them control the market.
    - echelon 5y ago
      > It’s only a problem if a single provider is a monopoly and uses that to squeeze out other companies in order to raise prices. The giants behave different to monopolies in the past. Amazon makes its catalogs available for free, which makes businesses like Netflix and their offerings look expensive. They subsidize the costs using revenues from different business units, which is not only unfair, it's not actually competition. It's not even necessarily about money. Giants care about attracting and keeping people on their platform. Once actual healthy businesses dry up, revenues paid to creatives will go down. They've already begun picking apart other studios and assimilating their businesses, and this will only accelerate. > Increased competition is a good thing. Not when music, movies, and art become just features of the tech giant platforms. It dumbs everything down and ensures the tech giant opinions are the ones that get amplified.
  - rzanella 5y ago
    I agree with you, which is why I subscribe to Netflix and Spotify, but man... - Netflix's so-so content while being costlier - And Spotify push to have podcasts instead of decent radio are not helping...
- drawkbox 5y ago
  Lots of Amazon music, in addition to Prime usage, is probably used with Alexa as well as that is the default music player on Alexa/Echo. Just like Siri/Homepod uses Apple Music and "Hey Google" / Google Home/Helper uses Google Play/Youtube music.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- cbhl 5y ago
  I'm under the impression that Amazon Music is US-only. It's decent if you're heavily invested in the Amazon Echo / Alexa ecosytem.
- pgrote 5y ago
  We subscribe simply because it is the only service that works on family plans without any friction on Echo devices. Tried to get Pandora and Spotify to work, but there was always a problem or the skill would fall apart over a period of months.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ssully 5y ago
I am curious what Google Play Music's share was before they shut it down in favor of Youtube Music. Myself and a few friends were using it until they shut it down; we basically split between Spotify and Apple Music based on what OS we were using.
- usehackernews 5y ago
  I recently switched to YouTube music from Spotify. I was a heavy Spotify member for many many years. I can’t deal with Spotify inserting podcasts into the music listening experience. Music and podcasts are two different use cases for me. I love both, but don’t love both in the same UI. So far I love YouTube music and very happy with the switch. I love that I can listen to live sets that people post on YouTube. Great recommendation system too.
circa 5y ago
I made the switch last September from Spotify back to Apple Music. 1 reason and 1 reason only. Lossless. Why Spotify still doesn't offer this as an option is beyond me. I get that its a small amount of people who care but still why not offer it? I would pay a little more to use their service.
- criddell 5y ago
  I've been trying to use Apple Music with their web client and it's astonishingly slow. I can't understand how it could be so bad.
  - salamandersauce 5y ago
    Yeah it's not good. I've only used a handful of times and every single time it just stopped playing in the middle of a song for no reason. It also sucks that they can't be bothered to create apps for anything other than their own stuff and Android. I can use Amazon music or Spoify with my Garmin Watch but not Apple Music.
    - criddell 5y ago
      I think you can still use iTunes on Windows.
- DashAnimal 5y ago
  You know, I used to care about lossless but more and more the proof has been stacking on that MP3 compression is an amazing technology and I just don't have the ears to discern. I would love to know how you do in this test: https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/... For me, it was enough to prove that lossy is good enough for everyday listening.
  - felix318 5y ago
    That was interesting. I listen mostly to classical and had no trouble whatsoever with the Mozart track, the difference was clear. The other tracks I was forced to guess and, strangely, got all wrong answers! Compressed classical music annoys me to no end, although for a long time I couldn’t tell why. Then I found out, the problem is the artifacts, which you may not be aware of but they do affect your emotional response. This page has an amazing description of the issues: https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/what-data-compression-does-your-music https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/what-data-compressio...
bvm 5y ago
Am i the only tidal user left?
- ravenstine 5y ago
  Nope! I'm a happy Tidal customer.
- netr0ute 5y ago
  It seems like the kinds of people using Tidal either jumped to Bandcamp or just download all their music.
- sleepyhead 5y ago
  Surprised they are so small. I use Tidal and I'm very happy with it. I switched after Spotify gave a ton of money to the podcast moron Joe Rogan and haven't looked back since (in addition to it being problematic to give money to someone like Joe Rogan, I also dislike how they are trying to own podcasts). I do wish I were able to use my Tidal iPhone app as a remote like Spotify can and that their AI suggestions would improve (Spotify has become really good here).
- topaz0 5y ago
  I wondered the same thing. I use tidal and think that it is good.
fdgsdfogijq 5y ago
I am long term bearish on Spotify, and if I could isolate Apples music business or Amazons, I would take the following trade all day: long (aapl music)(amzn music)(youtube music), short Spotify. Their recommendation engine is just not that good. Youtube Music has a far superior one.
- bradly 5y ago
  I still don't understand how a business can be unprofitable for 16 years. At one point don't you say, "whelp, this isn't going to work"?
  - gorjusborg 5y ago
    https://www.barrons.com/articles/spotify-has-finally-found-a-profitable-tune-51635346820 https://www.barrons.com/articles/spotify-has-finally-found-a...
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - bradly 5y ago
      Oh nice. They are getting close! Still unprofitable, but maybe year seventeen is the sweet spot.
- michaelmarion 5y ago
  I agree on the recommendation piece, but Apple’s playlist and library management is atrocious, especially on desktop. Why can’t I drag-and-drop music into a playlist in the sidebar? Apple Music also feels (to me, at least) much slower than Spotify. Most likely this is due to the more aggressive client-side caching that Spotify does, but it’s worth the trade-off, in my opinion. These are solvable problems for Apple, though. They need to more cleanly separate the legacy iTunes Store and pay-per-song UX from the Apple Music streaming paradigm. Maybe even have separate apps for them.
  - 5y ago
fourseventy 5y ago
I was a long time user of Google Play Music until they killed it and moved everyone over to the inferior YouTube Music product. I suffuer through it mostly because it comes bundled with YouTube+ which removes ads.
- refulgentis 5y ago
  It's doing fairly well - the report says its the only service that grew last year. I loved that Google Play Music still had a trad aughts iTunes approach to things, but it was confusing and out of sync with the market. YouTube Music is pretty awesome IMHO.
- lewisinc 5y ago
  I use the Vinegar extension for Safari which replaces the YouTube player for a simple HTML5 <video> tag and consequently removes the ads. Don't know if there's alternatives for other browsers, but worth looking into if this is all that's keeping you there.
  - st3ve445678 5y ago
    Firefox with ublock origin extension also removes all ads from youtube.
- anoonmoose 5y ago
  Long time user of Google Play Music as well and I gotta say...while YouTube Music is slightly inferior (edit: to GPM), it's not even close to inferior enough to convince me to go back to Spotify. Granted, it does look like Spotify finally fixed the thing that got me to leave in the first place (10K library limit) but there's nothing so bad about YTM that I'd bother to pick up and move again.
  - amanzi 5y ago
    Depending on your point of view, YouTube Music is far inferior to Spotify. The key advantage to Spotify is that they have apps for all platforms and have a much better integration story than YouTube Music. For example, I can stream directly from the Spotify app on Android to my Sonos speakers, I can use a Spotify app on my Samsung TV, I can integrate Spotify on my Home Assistant server, and I can sync Spotify playlists to my Garmin watch for offline access. None of that is possible with YouTube Music.
DisjointedHunt 5y ago
Apple Music only has significant usage because of their anti competitive behavior. All apps on the App Store have to go through rigorous review and are restricted to Apples discretion in being granted access to OS features while Apple themselves use undocumented features to compete as a platform. Try hooking up AirPods to your iPhone and do nothing else. The Lock Screen changes to have an Apple Music player with a random song you may have never listened to. This, even if you were listening to another song on YouTube Music or any other music app as your last played audio. On more than one occasion, I’ve accidentally played some idiotic pop song that Apple Music pushes into this experience while commuting with AirPods and noise cancellation on while holding the phone firmly grasped in my hand. It’s ridiculous how many of these little UX tricks they adopt that boost the metrics of their internal products while openly denying the competition access to the same.
- __david__ 5y ago
  I just tried this and my lock screen shows me 4 thumbnails that I know are my most played songs/playlists but the main app and play button are the video that I most recently watched (and paused) in firefox. I know when I listen to postcasts using Overcast (since I like their UI better than Apple's), it shows up in the lock screen. This is reliable for me. It also becomes the default thing to play if I hook up to my CarPlay. So I don't think these are necessarily anti-competitive practices—it may just be you are hitting a weird bug or edge case.
  - DisjointedHunt 5y ago
    A "Weird bug or edge case" is rarely the case with these upsells. There's a lot of marketing and research budget that goes into designing these flows and equally tonnes of data behind observing the behavior. That precisely is my point. The behavior on my end is strange as well where it happens at times i'm commuting and other times, when the phone is still, nothing. Where can i go and switch this off in settings for Apple Music short of killing the app and uninstalling? Isn't it strange that all app behavior and interaction with the OS for apps that aren't owned by Apple need to be predictable and controlled through standard settings while Apple Music has hidden access to over ride these behaviors? I can write paragraphs about similar behavior on the News app and other upsell services. When a platform can directly push apps without competition to your device that they don't need to compete with anyone for installs for, that is one thing, having access to undocumented APIs is another, having the ability to plow all revenue from their apps right back in without the 30% cut or other restrictive practices they impose on their direct competitors is yet another. Either there should be transparency or there should be restrictions on the way internal Apple apps are allowed to compete in the marketplace. A random product manager at Cupertino should not have more power and clout over what apps get pushed to my phone without consent or dialogs and upsells get thrown in the UX compared to what is possible for public apps to do.
Closi 5y ago
Would be interesting to see this broken down by region - Spotify is very dominant in the UK in my experience for example, but not sure if there will be pockets / countries where it swings the other way. Personally I find Apple Music just a bit clinical, and it's just not as universal (for instance Spotify works just as well on a PC as a Mac - iTunes for Windows though? ugh).
wwweston 5y ago
I pulled the trigger on an Apple Music subscription this year because it pays artists better. Spotify still considers a penny per stream "entitled" according to an exec giving one of the most absolutely tone-deaf AND nonsensical justifications for their choices ("we solved piracy by more or less adopting piracy's business model and legitimizing it!") [0] Apple stepped up to that level. [1] Revenue streams from recordings matter for supporting artists. There's still some issues with the economics of buffet streaming, but a penny a stream starts to at least approach the right magnitude. [0] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/29/spotify-executive-entitled-pay-penny-per-stream/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/29/spotify-executiv... [1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/16/22387453/apple-music-artist-payment-rate-per-stream-vs-spotify https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/16/22387453/apple-music-arti...
- deadmutex 5y ago
  > Apple Music subscription this year because it pays artists better. I wonder if this is a growth tactic. If Apple was more altruistic, one could argue that they would pay their App store 3rd party devs (by taking less of a cut via the App store) better too. So, I am going to chalk this up as a possible business decision for growth.
  - fundatus 5y ago
    I am sure this is not about Apple being altruistic or caring about artists at all. All streaming services pay out about 70-80% of their revenue. It just happens to be that for Apple Music "money to be paid to rights holders" / "number of total streams" equals a slightly higher "payout per stream" than their main competitor. There are other players on the market that pay twice or even three times as much per stream compared to Apple Music.
- rodgerd 5y ago
  I used to use Tidal for the same reason, but the ongoing MQA debacle pushed me over to Music. I have to say that I preferred Tidal's recommendations.
- Steltek 5y ago
joshstrange 5y ago
I am all in on Apple and only a few dollars away from the Apple One bundle being worth it for me but I just don't like Apple Music. The UI is just too difficult to use and it feels slower than it should be, definitely slower than Spotify. While I have no love for Spotify's podcast ventures and dislike them trying to push me to listen to podcasts on their platform, I do love it for music and it "Just Works". Also I can use Spotify with my Echo's in ways that don't work with Apple Music. Yes, you can play Apple Music through the Echo's but only using your voice. With Spotify I can throw music to an Echo or a group of them and control it all from my phone.
- hbn 5y ago
  Spotify is a nonstarter for me because I can't upload my own music. I don't want to be beholden to whatever they decide I can listen to, and there's lots of music I want to listen to that's not in any streaming catalogue. edit: note I say "upload," not syncing local files to my phone. I want a built-in streaming catalogue + cloud music locker that all my devices stream from, not something I have to manually transfer files between for every device
  - joshstrange 5y ago
    That's completely fair and I even pay for iTunes Match even though I don't really use it anymore, it and Apple Music never meshed well in my experience but maybe it's gotten better. There is a way to listen to your own music in Spotify (even mobile) [0] but it might be a little shaky, I doubt they care much about it. I've used it before but only on desktop. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-upload-music-to-spotify https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-upload-music-to-spoti...
    - hbn 5y ago
      I've read up on Spotify's custom library stuff, and it seems to just be a weird hack that only works on one device. What I really want is a music locker I can stream to any device to fill in the gaps that aren't available in the streaming library.
schoolornot 5y ago
Eddy Cue should be fired for allowing Spotify to reach such critical mass. Music and playlists is such a sticky ecosystem that people don't just up and switch services at a whim. The 381 million users that Spotify accumulated over the years will never switch to another platform. Apple lost so many years with trying to spin Beats into something that it wasn't, rewriting clients, and putting out garbage like "Your Station".
- manmal 5y ago
  Their Music clients are also still far away from what I‘d expect from a Trillion dollar company.
  - hbn 5y ago
    I actually like the iOS Music app (though their queue system isn't as intuitive as Google Play Music/YouTube Music) but their webapp and Mac app are hot garbage. I recall seeing an article that said the Mac app was being rewritten in the new macOS betas.
    - my123 5y ago
      The iOS and Android apps are both kinda okay, but the web, Mac and Windows ones just suck.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      The redesigned iOS & Mac apps are a pile of shit and are a significant downgrade from the earlier "iPod" app and iTunes. Yes it turns out it's possible to do something even worse than iTunes.
- Macha 5y ago
  I actually disagree here, iTunes music is DRM free so users still have it without the subscription service, and the music streaming services all have most of the tracks unlike video streaming so there's no moat to be built. Bad for Apple, good for consumers.
- 5y ago
shaan7 5y ago
I dread the day when iTunes stops letting you buy DRM-free music. I don't know anywhere else I can do that easily (and is the only Apple service I use).
- dustyharddrive 5y ago
  I haven't used it myself yet but 7digital sells FLAC and MP3/M4A of many releases: https://us.7digital.com/ https://us.7digital.com/
- __david__ 5y ago
  Nowadays I tend to use bandcamp.com over iTunes for purchased music. It tends to only have smaller artists on there but they also sell flac/wav, which I like better than buying compressed music (I listen to things compressed but if I'm buying it I want it future-proof).
pgrote 5y ago
Pandora isn't on the list, but I am unsure they are global. When they were purchased by Sirius I wanted to move to a Sirius subscription, but found out they would not port over your Music Genome Project information over. You would have to train it again. No other service has a feature that works so well. We keep it just for that reason.
- YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
  I have used Pandora over VPN for like 10 years but decided to just drop it because it's not worth the hassle of getting the US app on iPhones anymore. They have the coming soon page for Germany up since 2014 and still nothing. I miss it.
daigoba66 5y ago
I still miss Rdio.
steve-benjamins 5y ago
I’m an indie artist and here’s the avg split on my plays per week: Spotify: 25,000 Apple Music: 600 … Not trying to make a statement— just sharing cause it’s interesting!
- cujo 5y ago
  How much do you make from each of those services?
- reaperducer 5y ago
  Since the big topic of discussion on HN has been how much artist make from those streams, can you give us a ballpark figure of how much you get from each service?
aparticulate 5y ago
sluggish UI aside, I really don't like Apple Music's TASTE in music. Spotify's playlists are reliably more niche. Apple is far more "GRAMMY/Top 40"-oriented and that's just not interesting to me. Also, Apple should have bought Rdio.
- circa 5y ago
  If you think Apple's TASTE is bad, you should try TIDAL. Its really bad.
  - sleepyhead 5y ago
    Music curation was actually what made Tidal (Wimp) great in the first place. They didn't have the tech that Spotify had, and at the time the Spotify AI wasn't very good either, so the Tidal curated lists were really good and much better than the AI-generated (?) ones from Spotify. Things changed after Jay-Z stepped in, Tidal recommending Jay-z & friends is one example. Don't know if manual list curation is still a priority for them. Besides, perhaps your taste in music is not aligned with most others.
  - pph 5y ago
    I'm currently trying Tidal and that's the main issue why I won't stay. Somehow there only seem to be official playlists, so if I search for a somewhat niche genre [0] I'll probably not find anything relevant, except maybe some compilation releases of dubious value. I managed to bring their auto generated playlists to an acceptable level by favoring enough artists, but it's still a very lacking experience. [0] e.g. searching for Detroit house playlists gives me "Classic Rock Classics". Lofi house → "Epidemic Sound Christmas".
- reaperducer 5y ago
  I really don't like Apple Music's TASTE in music. I'm with you there. Apple (and really all the streaming services) are constantly crowing about how many millions of songs they have. How about some metric for how many good songs they have? 80% of my wife's record collection is not available on Apple Music, so I'm left ripping her records in what used to be my spare time. The only reason we have Apple Music is for when an artist she follows puts out a new record, so she can listen to the album to decide if it's worth buying. Also, Apple Music's Siri integration is horrendous. For example, no matter what request I shout to it, Siri can only play one particular song by Weird Al Yankovich. My guess is that there's something with the quotation marks commonly used in his name screwing up Apple's search mechanism. I have high hopes for Apple's new classical streaming service. It has a chance to redeem itself there.
poulsbohemian 5y ago
I expect Apple Music to continue to erode market share of these competitors... Apple One is just too compelling to be avoided, once you are in the Apple ecosphere. We had a Spotify family plan, but its a domino thing - once you start using one service, like AppleTV, it becomes a no-brainer to just switch everything over to apple rather than pay for different services. Is Spotify better for some people? Possibly, but for many (like myself) Apple Music was "good enough." I do agree with schoolornot's post that Apple wasted a lot of time and let Spotify get farther ahead than they should have. It definitely feels like Apple has been agonizingly slow to push out and improve services.
sedeki 5y ago
I don't see YouTube Music mentioned anywhere in the report?
- deadmutex 5y ago
  "YouTube Music was the only Western DSP to increase global market share during this the period. YouTube Music particularly resonates among Gen Z and younger Millennials, which should have alarm bells ringing for Spotify, as their core base of Millennial subscribers from the 2010s in the West are now beginning to age." It's also in the chart.
gerash 5y ago
I recently switched to iPhone from Pixel. The overall UI touch responsiveness and battery life is an upgrade but the OS features are neither upgrade or downgrade. I also got Apple Music trial for 6 months while having a YT subscription. Even though the app seems just fine and nice looking but why would anyone pay for it vs. YouTube Music? With YouTube you get a larger selection of songs (including all user uploaded stuff to YT) and it removes ads on YT. So what exactly is the rationale to pay for Apple Music? I believe Apple Music being the default option on Apple devices plays the biggest role in its market share
- josteink 5y ago
  > So what exactly is the rationale to pay for Apple Music? Googles absolute failure to provide family plans for people using Google-apps/Gsuite as their family domain and accounts. You have to buy individual subscriptions to everyone. It’s literally not an even an option.
- Case81 5y ago
  Not sure about Apple Music but I simply don’t use YouTube Music because it’s actually missing a LOT of stuff for me. Off the top of my head, some Beatles remasters and obscure synth artists
  - hbn 5y ago
    Yeah, and I've had artists I follow release new music, and it seems to sometimes not land on YTM the same day as Apple Music and Spotify. Certain albums just never showed up. And you know what, I can't blame them for not caring about keeping up with Google's services. Who knows how many days YTM has before it's axed and replaced with something else.
- msbarnett 5y ago
  > So what exactly is the rationale to pay for Apple Music? For $20 my wife and I both get Apple Music, Apple TV+ (several shows we enjoy on there), 200GB Cloud Storage, and subscription access to a bunch of video games. 2 subscriptions to YouTube Music by itself would cost us the same $20, with none of the other benefits (and it has a muuuuch lousier selection of stuff I like, at least – plus a lot of the user-uploaded content has audio quality on par with some 96khz mp3 I'd have gotten off of napster two decades ago, whereas Apple's increasingly streaming lossless)
YesThisIsJay 5y ago
I have recently decided to try Apple Music as apart of trial of Apple One trial (not likely to go beyond that) my biggest gripe with it is the usability on any platform outside of iDevice/Mac. It seems to be a 'pleasant enough' experience on my iPhone/ATV, but once I transition to my PC for work. A place where I would listen to music for a lot of my day. The PC client is trash, they have a semi capable web client, but it was just feeling Apple Music lite. One thing with Spotify is that I appreciate the effort across all platforms (well, at least the ones I've used) iTunes on Windows feels like they stopped working on it back in 2008 and now have some interns trying to support it.
beardedman 5y ago
Spotify's song radio feature is killer for me. I've found so many great new (very niche) artists. Of course royalties can always be better.
izacus 5y ago
One player is missing on this table, the biggest one: YouTube. Not Music, just YouTube. They're beating all others in play counts by a magnitude.
- Tenoke 5y ago
  That's what I use 99% of the time though perhaps I should check out what YouTube Music is about. Edit: Checked it out and some of the songs in my playlists are grayed out in Music perhaps because it thinks those are non-music videos but nonetheless it looks inferior for my purposes.
cardosof 5y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong: the first and second ones in market share aren't the most interesting part. What's insightful is that Amazon is at third. Spotify is a pure player in the space and with it's years of growth it makes sense to be #1. Apple, while not a pure player as Spotify, has a good share of the mobile devices market and smartwatch, and that and music go hand in hand. Amazon? To Amazon music is just another thing in their miryad of things, and they're still at the top.
- msbarnett 5y ago
  Amazon Music is a throw-in on Prime, so technically I "have" it as a subscriber to Prime, but I've literally never used it. Of all of the players in this space, it's not clear to me that Amazon's "subscriber share" reflects anything at all considering that it's not something you subscribe to on its own and not generally considered a major benefit of the subscription it's included in. Would be interesting to see what the actual usage statistics look like.
  - mupuff1234 5y ago
    I'm a prime user and wasn't even aware of Amazon music. I'm guessing that when Alexa plays music it counts as an Amazon music user.
commandlinefan 5y ago
"Other 10%" seems weird... are there really (at least) 10 more music services that captured 1 or less percent of the market?
- jonwinstanley 5y ago
  There are a lot of services which are region specific
zuminator 5y ago
Apple Music comes "free" with my phone service, and I use it sometimes. YouTube Premium is a must for me, and it comes with YouTube Music, which I use very occasionally. Yet I still subscribe to, and overwhelmingly use Spotify. It just seems much more organized and discoverable than the other two services. Also I don't make personal playlists because I enjoy listening to unknown music interspersed with my favorites, and Spotify seems to be the best at giving me the right mixture of that. There are some music genres that Spotify is somewhat deficient in compared with Apple, but it's been getting better in that respect little by little.
spoonjim 5y ago
Kind of sucks that if you build any really successful app on iOS then Apple will come in and force their way into your market and have deep analytics on your own app when doing so. Spotify->Apple Music, Netflix -> Apple TV+, Peloton-> Apple Fitness.
jhoechtl 5y ago
I am using a music streaming service which is totally free and offers me genres without any subscription lock-in. Additionally it doesn't track my listening habits and thus enables me to discover new music as I am not in a listening bubble. I like that streaming service a lot
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  The radio?
  - jhoechtl 5y ago
    Yes ...
msoad 5y ago
Spotify is missing Spatial Audio that both Apple Music and Amazon Music supports. I might switch to Apple Music because I don't like how pushy Spotify has become with their podcast agenda and not supporting Spatial Audio.
Fomite 5y ago
I switched back to Apple Music because of Joe Rogan's deal with Spotify, but I recognize that this is likely a niche reason.

I have a huge and old MP3 library that is an amalgamation of my CDs, and some of my parent's CDs too. I think it's about two or three months of classical music. I suspect that many HN readers also have similar stories. None of this will show up in a market survey like this.

mickotron 5y ago

Deezer is awesome. The HiFi subscription has a lot of content at FLAC quality.

gfiorav 5y ago

Big surprise for me is Amazon music... with 13%! I don't know anyone that uses it. Maybe it's a regional thing?

hwbehrens 5y ago
My wife and I share a single Spotify account, so when she's listening, I switch to the free tier of Amazon Music. I wonder if that counts toward that 13%?
- circa 5y ago
  There is a couples account option and I think its very close to the same price of a single sub. Edit: its called Spotify Duo and its $12.99 vs $9.99 https://www.spotify.com/us/premium/#plans https://www.spotify.com/us/premium/#plans
Apocryphon 5y ago
Does Amazon give out Music accounts as a bonus when users subscribe to some other service, similar to Amazon Prime customers getting streaming? Maybe that can account for incidental and not intentional subscribers.
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  Yes they do. Prime comes with a limited version that "only" has a couple million songs. At least in some countries. They also have a higher tier called Music Unlimited that's more on-par with the other guys content wise but cheaper if you already sub to Prime. Also have a tier that only works on Echos but gives access to the larger catalog for even less. I switched to just using the included service with Prime. It's good enough for me and I get Prime super cheap as a student.
- fullstop 5y ago
  Some purchases on Amazon come with "3 months of amazon music", which surely adds to their numbers.
YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
Anecdotal but my parents use the one integrated in prime because they mainly listen to old music.
yumraj 5y ago
It's free with Prime and cheaper than other alternates for the paid version if you have Prime. For casual listening it's not bad at all. It also supports so called HD and Ultra HD, which I believe Spotify still doesn't support, while Apple does.
- paxys 5y ago
  It is not free with Prime, just $2 cheaper ($8 vs $10/mo). I think what is driving Amazon Music subscriptions is the proliferation of Echo devices. It is easy to auto-subscribe from the speaker itself (sometimes too easy, to the point of being accidental), e.g. when you ask it to play a song.
  - jasode 5y ago
    >It is not free with Prime, just $2 cheaper There's a free tier Amazon Music of 2 million songs included with Prime membership. That's the free music streaming my friend was using for 5+ years. She then upgraded to Amazon Music Unlimited for extra $80/year. Can't tell if the article's 13% for Amazon Music is counting the free tier users.
    - paxys 5y ago
      In that case every Prime member is a subscriber, and that number should be a lot larger.
      - sofixa 5y ago
        Nah, I'm a Prime subscriber and get the occasional email from Amazon that i have an unused advantage from my subscription and should enable Amazon Music.
  - yumraj 5y ago
    As sibling comment also noted, there is a free tier that we've been using forever. They also have a much cheaper option for students, I think $1/month or something like that. Not sure if every Prime user uses Amazon Music, and how they count their user base.
echelon 5y ago
Long term, Spotify and Netflix are in trouble. Amazon and Apple are in this space, and they can use their trillion dollar market caps to decimate single-revenue stream companies. The Department of Justice should do something about this. Neither Amazon nor Apple should be in these businesses. They do too much and apply price pressure unfairly. If this continues, $1T+ tech will be the entire economy. Netflix, Spotify, and all of the other "little companies" should sue the ever-loving bejesus out of these monsters for anti-competitive practices.
- nostromo 5y ago
  Increased competition is a good thing. I’m glad several companies are in this space. It’s only a problem if a single provider is a monopoly and uses that to squeeze out other companies in order to raise prices. We’re very far off from that because there are so many companies competing and none of them control the market.
  - echelon 5y ago
    > It’s only a problem if a single provider is a monopoly and uses that to squeeze out other companies in order to raise prices. The giants behave different to monopolies in the past. Amazon makes its catalogs available for free, which makes businesses like Netflix and their offerings look expensive. They subsidize the costs using revenues from different business units, which is not only unfair, it's not actually competition. It's not even necessarily about money. Giants care about attracting and keeping people on their platform. Once actual healthy businesses dry up, revenues paid to creatives will go down. They've already begun picking apart other studios and assimilating their businesses, and this will only accelerate. > Increased competition is a good thing. Not when music, movies, and art become just features of the tech giant platforms. It dumbs everything down and ensures the tech giant opinions are the ones that get amplified.
- rzanella 5y ago
  I agree with you, which is why I subscribe to Netflix and Spotify, but man... - Netflix's so-so content while being costlier - And Spotify push to have podcasts instead of decent radio are not helping...
drawkbox 5y ago
Lots of Amazon music, in addition to Prime usage, is probably used with Alexa as well as that is the default music player on Alexa/Echo. Just like Siri/Homepod uses Apple Music and "Hey Google" / Google Home/Helper uses Google Play/Youtube music.
deleted 5y ago
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cbhl 5y ago
I'm under the impression that Amazon Music is US-only. It's decent if you're heavily invested in the Amazon Echo / Alexa ecosytem.
pgrote 5y ago
We subscribe simply because it is the only service that works on family plans without any friction on Echo devices. Tried to get Pandora and Spotify to work, but there was always a problem or the skill would fall apart over a period of months.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ssully 5y ago

I am curious what Google Play Music's share was before they shut it down in favor of Youtube Music. Myself and a few friends were using it until they shut it down; we basically split between Spotify and Apple Music based on what OS we were using.

usehackernews 5y ago
I recently switched to YouTube music from Spotify. I was a heavy Spotify member for many many years. I can’t deal with Spotify inserting podcasts into the music listening experience. Music and podcasts are two different use cases for me. I love both, but don’t love both in the same UI. So far I love YouTube music and very happy with the switch. I love that I can listen to live sets that people post on YouTube. Great recommendation system too.

circa 5y ago

I made the switch last September from Spotify back to Apple Music. 1 reason and 1 reason only. Lossless. Why Spotify still doesn't offer this as an option is beyond me. I get that its a small amount of people who care but still why not offer it? I would pay a little more to use their service.

criddell 5y ago
I've been trying to use Apple Music with their web client and it's astonishingly slow. I can't understand how it could be so bad.
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  Yeah it's not good. I've only used a handful of times and every single time it just stopped playing in the middle of a song for no reason. It also sucks that they can't be bothered to create apps for anything other than their own stuff and Android. I can use Amazon music or Spoify with my Garmin Watch but not Apple Music.
  - criddell 5y ago
    I think you can still use iTunes on Windows.
DashAnimal 5y ago
You know, I used to care about lossless but more and more the proof has been stacking on that MP3 compression is an amazing technology and I just don't have the ears to discern. I would love to know how you do in this test: https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/... For me, it was enough to prove that lossy is good enough for everyday listening.
- felix318 5y ago
  That was interesting. I listen mostly to classical and had no trouble whatsoever with the Mozart track, the difference was clear. The other tracks I was forced to guess and, strangely, got all wrong answers! Compressed classical music annoys me to no end, although for a long time I couldn’t tell why. Then I found out, the problem is the artifacts, which you may not be aware of but they do affect your emotional response. This page has an amazing description of the issues: https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/what-data-compression-does-your-music https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/what-data-compressio...

bvm 5y ago

Am i the only tidal user left?

ravenstine 5y ago
Nope! I'm a happy Tidal customer.
netr0ute 5y ago
It seems like the kinds of people using Tidal either jumped to Bandcamp or just download all their music.
sleepyhead 5y ago
Surprised they are so small. I use Tidal and I'm very happy with it. I switched after Spotify gave a ton of money to the podcast moron Joe Rogan and haven't looked back since (in addition to it being problematic to give money to someone like Joe Rogan, I also dislike how they are trying to own podcasts). I do wish I were able to use my Tidal iPhone app as a remote like Spotify can and that their AI suggestions would improve (Spotify has become really good here).
topaz0 5y ago
I wondered the same thing. I use tidal and think that it is good.

fdgsdfogijq 5y ago

I am long term bearish on Spotify, and if I could isolate Apples music business or Amazons, I would take the following trade all day: long (aapl music)(amzn music)(youtube music), short Spotify. Their recommendation engine is just not that good. Youtube Music has a far superior one.

bradly 5y ago
I still don't understand how a business can be unprofitable for 16 years. At one point don't you say, "whelp, this isn't going to work"?
- gorjusborg 5y ago
  https://www.barrons.com/articles/spotify-has-finally-found-a-profitable-tune-51635346820 https://www.barrons.com/articles/spotify-has-finally-found-a...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - bradly 5y ago
    Oh nice. They are getting close! Still unprofitable, but maybe year seventeen is the sweet spot.
michaelmarion 5y ago
I agree on the recommendation piece, but Apple’s playlist and library management is atrocious, especially on desktop. Why can’t I drag-and-drop music into a playlist in the sidebar? Apple Music also feels (to me, at least) much slower than Spotify. Most likely this is due to the more aggressive client-side caching that Spotify does, but it’s worth the trade-off, in my opinion. These are solvable problems for Apple, though. They need to more cleanly separate the legacy iTunes Store and pay-per-song UX from the Apple Music streaming paradigm. Maybe even have separate apps for them.
- 5y ago

fourseventy 5y ago

I was a long time user of Google Play Music until they killed it and moved everyone over to the inferior YouTube Music product. I suffuer through it mostly because it comes bundled with YouTube+ which removes ads.

refulgentis 5y ago
It's doing fairly well - the report says its the only service that grew last year. I loved that Google Play Music still had a trad aughts iTunes approach to things, but it was confusing and out of sync with the market. YouTube Music is pretty awesome IMHO.
lewisinc 5y ago
I use the Vinegar extension for Safari which replaces the YouTube player for a simple HTML5 <video> tag and consequently removes the ads. Don't know if there's alternatives for other browsers, but worth looking into if this is all that's keeping you there.
- st3ve445678 5y ago
  Firefox with ublock origin extension also removes all ads from youtube.
anoonmoose 5y ago
Long time user of Google Play Music as well and I gotta say...while YouTube Music is slightly inferior (edit: to GPM), it's not even close to inferior enough to convince me to go back to Spotify. Granted, it does look like Spotify finally fixed the thing that got me to leave in the first place (10K library limit) but there's nothing so bad about YTM that I'd bother to pick up and move again.
- amanzi 5y ago
  Depending on your point of view, YouTube Music is far inferior to Spotify. The key advantage to Spotify is that they have apps for all platforms and have a much better integration story than YouTube Music. For example, I can stream directly from the Spotify app on Android to my Sonos speakers, I can use a Spotify app on my Samsung TV, I can integrate Spotify on my Home Assistant server, and I can sync Spotify playlists to my Garmin watch for offline access. None of that is possible with YouTube Music.

DisjointedHunt 5y ago

Apple Music only has significant usage because of their anti competitive behavior. All apps on the App Store have to go through rigorous review and are restricted to Apples discretion in being granted access to OS features while Apple themselves use undocumented features to compete as a platform. Try hooking up AirPods to your iPhone and do nothing else. The Lock Screen changes to have an Apple Music player with a random song you may have never listened to. This, even if you were listening to another song on YouTube Music or any other music app as your last played audio. On more than one occasion, I’ve accidentally played some idiotic pop song that Apple Music pushes into this experience while commuting with AirPods and noise cancellation on while holding the phone firmly grasped in my hand. It’s ridiculous how many of these little UX tricks they adopt that boost the metrics of their internal products while openly denying the competition access to the same.

__david__ 5y ago
I just tried this and my lock screen shows me 4 thumbnails that I know are my most played songs/playlists but the main app and play button are the video that I most recently watched (and paused) in firefox. I know when I listen to postcasts using Overcast (since I like their UI better than Apple's), it shows up in the lock screen. This is reliable for me. It also becomes the default thing to play if I hook up to my CarPlay. So I don't think these are necessarily anti-competitive practices—it may just be you are hitting a weird bug or edge case.
- DisjointedHunt 5y ago
  A "Weird bug or edge case" is rarely the case with these upsells. There's a lot of marketing and research budget that goes into designing these flows and equally tonnes of data behind observing the behavior. That precisely is my point. The behavior on my end is strange as well where it happens at times i'm commuting and other times, when the phone is still, nothing. Where can i go and switch this off in settings for Apple Music short of killing the app and uninstalling? Isn't it strange that all app behavior and interaction with the OS for apps that aren't owned by Apple need to be predictable and controlled through standard settings while Apple Music has hidden access to over ride these behaviors? I can write paragraphs about similar behavior on the News app and other upsell services. When a platform can directly push apps without competition to your device that they don't need to compete with anyone for installs for, that is one thing, having access to undocumented APIs is another, having the ability to plow all revenue from their apps right back in without the 30% cut or other restrictive practices they impose on their direct competitors is yet another. Either there should be transparency or there should be restrictions on the way internal Apple apps are allowed to compete in the marketplace. A random product manager at Cupertino should not have more power and clout over what apps get pushed to my phone without consent or dialogs and upsells get thrown in the UX compared to what is possible for public apps to do.

Closi 5y ago

Would be interesting to see this broken down by region - Spotify is very dominant in the UK in my experience for example, but not sure if there will be pockets / countries where it swings the other way. Personally I find Apple Music just a bit clinical, and it's just not as universal (for instance Spotify works just as well on a PC as a Mac - iTunes for Windows though? ugh).

wwweston 5y ago

I pulled the trigger on an Apple Music subscription this year because it pays artists better. Spotify still considers a penny per stream "entitled" according to an exec giving one of the most absolutely tone-deaf AND nonsensical justifications for their choices ("we solved piracy by more or less adopting piracy's business model and legitimizing it!") [0] Apple stepped up to that level. [1] Revenue streams from recordings matter for supporting artists. There's still some issues with the economics of buffet streaming, but a penny a stream starts to at least approach the right magnitude. [0] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/29/spotify-executive-entitled-pay-penny-per-stream/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/29/spotify-executiv... [1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/16/22387453/apple-music-artist-payment-rate-per-stream-vs-spotify https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/16/22387453/apple-music-arti...

deadmutex 5y ago
> Apple Music subscription this year because it pays artists better. I wonder if this is a growth tactic. If Apple was more altruistic, one could argue that they would pay their App store 3rd party devs (by taking less of a cut via the App store) better too. So, I am going to chalk this up as a possible business decision for growth.
- fundatus 5y ago
  I am sure this is not about Apple being altruistic or caring about artists at all. All streaming services pay out about 70-80% of their revenue. It just happens to be that for Apple Music "money to be paid to rights holders" / "number of total streams" equals a slightly higher "payout per stream" than their main competitor. There are other players on the market that pay twice or even three times as much per stream compared to Apple Music.
rodgerd 5y ago
I used to use Tidal for the same reason, but the ongoing MQA debacle pushed me over to Music. I have to say that I preferred Tidal's recommendations.
Steltek 5y ago

joshstrange 5y ago

I am all in on Apple and only a few dollars away from the Apple One bundle being worth it for me but I just don't like Apple Music. The UI is just too difficult to use and it feels slower than it should be, definitely slower than Spotify. While I have no love for Spotify's podcast ventures and dislike them trying to push me to listen to podcasts on their platform, I do love it for music and it "Just Works". Also I can use Spotify with my Echo's in ways that don't work with Apple Music. Yes, you can play Apple Music through the Echo's but only using your voice. With Spotify I can throw music to an Echo or a group of them and control it all from my phone.

hbn 5y ago
Spotify is a nonstarter for me because I can't upload my own music. I don't want to be beholden to whatever they decide I can listen to, and there's lots of music I want to listen to that's not in any streaming catalogue. edit: note I say "upload," not syncing local files to my phone. I want a built-in streaming catalogue + cloud music locker that all my devices stream from, not something I have to manually transfer files between for every device
- joshstrange 5y ago
  That's completely fair and I even pay for iTunes Match even though I don't really use it anymore, it and Apple Music never meshed well in my experience but maybe it's gotten better. There is a way to listen to your own music in Spotify (even mobile) [0] but it might be a little shaky, I doubt they care much about it. I've used it before but only on desktop. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-upload-music-to-spotify https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-upload-music-to-spoti...
  - hbn 5y ago
    I've read up on Spotify's custom library stuff, and it seems to just be a weird hack that only works on one device. What I really want is a music locker I can stream to any device to fill in the gaps that aren't available in the streaming library.

schoolornot 5y ago

Eddy Cue should be fired for allowing Spotify to reach such critical mass. Music and playlists is such a sticky ecosystem that people don't just up and switch services at a whim. The 381 million users that Spotify accumulated over the years will never switch to another platform. Apple lost so many years with trying to spin Beats into something that it wasn't, rewriting clients, and putting out garbage like "Your Station".

manmal 5y ago
Their Music clients are also still far away from what I‘d expect from a Trillion dollar company.
- hbn 5y ago
  I actually like the iOS Music app (though their queue system isn't as intuitive as Google Play Music/YouTube Music) but their webapp and Mac app are hot garbage. I recall seeing an article that said the Mac app was being rewritten in the new macOS betas.
  - my123 5y ago
    The iOS and Android apps are both kinda okay, but the web, Mac and Windows ones just suck.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    The redesigned iOS & Mac apps are a pile of shit and are a significant downgrade from the earlier "iPod" app and iTunes. Yes it turns out it's possible to do something even worse than iTunes.
Macha 5y ago
I actually disagree here, iTunes music is DRM free so users still have it without the subscription service, and the music streaming services all have most of the tracks unlike video streaming so there's no moat to be built. Bad for Apple, good for consumers.
5y ago

shaan7 5y ago

I dread the day when iTunes stops letting you buy DRM-free music. I don't know anywhere else I can do that easily (and is the only Apple service I use).

dustyharddrive 5y ago
I haven't used it myself yet but 7digital sells FLAC and MP3/M4A of many releases: https://us.7digital.com/ https://us.7digital.com/
__david__ 5y ago
Nowadays I tend to use bandcamp.com over iTunes for purchased music. It tends to only have smaller artists on there but they also sell flac/wav, which I like better than buying compressed music (I listen to things compressed but if I'm buying it I want it future-proof).

pgrote 5y ago

Pandora isn't on the list, but I am unsure they are global. When they were purchased by Sirius I wanted to move to a Sirius subscription, but found out they would not port over your Music Genome Project information over. You would have to train it again. No other service has a feature that works so well. We keep it just for that reason.

YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
I have used Pandora over VPN for like 10 years but decided to just drop it because it's not worth the hassle of getting the US app on iPhones anymore. They have the coming soon page for Germany up since 2014 and still nothing. I miss it.

daigoba66 5y ago

I still miss Rdio.

steve-benjamins 5y ago

I’m an indie artist and here’s the avg split on my plays per week: Spotify: 25,000 Apple Music: 600 … Not trying to make a statement— just sharing cause it’s interesting!

cujo 5y ago
How much do you make from each of those services?
reaperducer 5y ago
Since the big topic of discussion on HN has been how much artist make from those streams, can you give us a ballpark figure of how much you get from each service?

aparticulate 5y ago

sluggish UI aside, I really don't like Apple Music's TASTE in music. Spotify's playlists are reliably more niche. Apple is far more "GRAMMY/Top 40"-oriented and that's just not interesting to me. Also, Apple should have bought Rdio.

circa 5y ago
If you think Apple's TASTE is bad, you should try TIDAL. Its really bad.
- sleepyhead 5y ago
  Music curation was actually what made Tidal (Wimp) great in the first place. They didn't have the tech that Spotify had, and at the time the Spotify AI wasn't very good either, so the Tidal curated lists were really good and much better than the AI-generated (?) ones from Spotify. Things changed after Jay-Z stepped in, Tidal recommending Jay-z & friends is one example. Don't know if manual list curation is still a priority for them. Besides, perhaps your taste in music is not aligned with most others.
- pph 5y ago
  I'm currently trying Tidal and that's the main issue why I won't stay. Somehow there only seem to be official playlists, so if I search for a somewhat niche genre [0] I'll probably not find anything relevant, except maybe some compilation releases of dubious value. I managed to bring their auto generated playlists to an acceptable level by favoring enough artists, but it's still a very lacking experience. [0] e.g. searching for Detroit house playlists gives me "Classic Rock Classics". Lofi house → "Epidemic Sound Christmas".
reaperducer 5y ago
I really don't like Apple Music's TASTE in music. I'm with you there. Apple (and really all the streaming services) are constantly crowing about how many millions of songs they have. How about some metric for how many good songs they have? 80% of my wife's record collection is not available on Apple Music, so I'm left ripping her records in what used to be my spare time. The only reason we have Apple Music is for when an artist she follows puts out a new record, so she can listen to the album to decide if it's worth buying. Also, Apple Music's Siri integration is horrendous. For example, no matter what request I shout to it, Siri can only play one particular song by Weird Al Yankovich. My guess is that there's something with the quotation marks commonly used in his name screwing up Apple's search mechanism. I have high hopes for Apple's new classical streaming service. It has a chance to redeem itself there.

poulsbohemian 5y ago

I expect Apple Music to continue to erode market share of these competitors... Apple One is just too compelling to be avoided, once you are in the Apple ecosphere. We had a Spotify family plan, but its a domino thing - once you start using one service, like AppleTV, it becomes a no-brainer to just switch everything over to apple rather than pay for different services. Is Spotify better for some people? Possibly, but for many (like myself) Apple Music was "good enough." I do agree with schoolornot's post that Apple wasted a lot of time and let Spotify get farther ahead than they should have. It definitely feels like Apple has been agonizingly slow to push out and improve services.

sedeki 5y ago

I don't see YouTube Music mentioned anywhere in the report?

deadmutex 5y ago
"YouTube Music was the only Western DSP to increase global market share during this the period. YouTube Music particularly resonates among Gen Z and younger Millennials, which should have alarm bells ringing for Spotify, as their core base of Millennial subscribers from the 2010s in the West are now beginning to age." It's also in the chart.

gerash 5y ago

I recently switched to iPhone from Pixel. The overall UI touch responsiveness and battery life is an upgrade but the OS features are neither upgrade or downgrade. I also got Apple Music trial for 6 months while having a YT subscription. Even though the app seems just fine and nice looking but why would anyone pay for it vs. YouTube Music? With YouTube you get a larger selection of songs (including all user uploaded stuff to YT) and it removes ads on YT. So what exactly is the rationale to pay for Apple Music? I believe Apple Music being the default option on Apple devices plays the biggest role in its market share

josteink 5y ago
> So what exactly is the rationale to pay for Apple Music? Googles absolute failure to provide family plans for people using Google-apps/Gsuite as their family domain and accounts. You have to buy individual subscriptions to everyone. It’s literally not an even an option.
Case81 5y ago
Not sure about Apple Music but I simply don’t use YouTube Music because it’s actually missing a LOT of stuff for me. Off the top of my head, some Beatles remasters and obscure synth artists
- hbn 5y ago
  Yeah, and I've had artists I follow release new music, and it seems to sometimes not land on YTM the same day as Apple Music and Spotify. Certain albums just never showed up. And you know what, I can't blame them for not caring about keeping up with Google's services. Who knows how many days YTM has before it's axed and replaced with something else.
msbarnett 5y ago
> So what exactly is the rationale to pay for Apple Music? For $20 my wife and I both get Apple Music, Apple TV+ (several shows we enjoy on there), 200GB Cloud Storage, and subscription access to a bunch of video games. 2 subscriptions to YouTube Music by itself would cost us the same $20, with none of the other benefits (and it has a muuuuch lousier selection of stuff I like, at least – plus a lot of the user-uploaded content has audio quality on par with some 96khz mp3 I'd have gotten off of napster two decades ago, whereas Apple's increasingly streaming lossless)

YesThisIsJay 5y ago

I have recently decided to try Apple Music as apart of trial of Apple One trial (not likely to go beyond that) my biggest gripe with it is the usability on any platform outside of iDevice/Mac. It seems to be a 'pleasant enough' experience on my iPhone/ATV, but once I transition to my PC for work. A place where I would listen to music for a lot of my day. The PC client is trash, they have a semi capable web client, but it was just feeling Apple Music lite. One thing with Spotify is that I appreciate the effort across all platforms (well, at least the ones I've used) iTunes on Windows feels like they stopped working on it back in 2008 and now have some interns trying to support it.

beardedman 5y ago

Spotify's song radio feature is killer for me. I've found so many great new (very niche) artists. Of course royalties can always be better.

izacus 5y ago

One player is missing on this table, the biggest one: YouTube. Not Music, just YouTube. They're beating all others in play counts by a magnitude.

Tenoke 5y ago
That's what I use 99% of the time though perhaps I should check out what YouTube Music is about. Edit: Checked it out and some of the songs in my playlists are grayed out in Music perhaps because it thinks those are non-music videos but nonetheless it looks inferior for my purposes.

cardosof 5y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong: the first and second ones in market share aren't the most interesting part. What's insightful is that Amazon is at third. Spotify is a pure player in the space and with it's years of growth it makes sense to be #1. Apple, while not a pure player as Spotify, has a good share of the mobile devices market and smartwatch, and that and music go hand in hand. Amazon? To Amazon music is just another thing in their miryad of things, and they're still at the top.

msbarnett 5y ago
Amazon Music is a throw-in on Prime, so technically I "have" it as a subscriber to Prime, but I've literally never used it. Of all of the players in this space, it's not clear to me that Amazon's "subscriber share" reflects anything at all considering that it's not something you subscribe to on its own and not generally considered a major benefit of the subscription it's included in. Would be interesting to see what the actual usage statistics look like.
- mupuff1234 5y ago
  I'm a prime user and wasn't even aware of Amazon music. I'm guessing that when Alexa plays music it counts as an Amazon music user.

commandlinefan 5y ago

"Other 10%" seems weird... are there really (at least) 10 more music services that captured 1 or less percent of the market?

jonwinstanley 5y ago
There are a lot of services which are region specific

zuminator 5y ago

Apple Music comes "free" with my phone service, and I use it sometimes. YouTube Premium is a must for me, and it comes with YouTube Music, which I use very occasionally. Yet I still subscribe to, and overwhelmingly use Spotify. It just seems much more organized and discoverable than the other two services. Also I don't make personal playlists because I enjoy listening to unknown music interspersed with my favorites, and Spotify seems to be the best at giving me the right mixture of that. There are some music genres that Spotify is somewhat deficient in compared with Apple, but it's been getting better in that respect little by little.

spoonjim 5y ago

Kind of sucks that if you build any really successful app on iOS then Apple will come in and force their way into your market and have deep analytics on your own app when doing so. Spotify->Apple Music, Netflix -> Apple TV+, Peloton-> Apple Fitness.

jhoechtl 5y ago

I am using a music streaming service which is totally free and offers me genres without any subscription lock-in. Additionally it doesn't track my listening habits and thus enables me to discover new music as I am not in a listening bubble. I like that streaming service a lot

Nextgrid 5y ago
The radio?
- jhoechtl 5y ago
  Yes ...

msoad 5y ago

Spotify is missing Spatial Audio that both Apple Music and Amazon Music supports. I might switch to Apple Music because I don't like how pushy Spotify has become with their podcast agenda and not supporting Spatial Audio.

Fomite 5y ago

I switched back to Apple Music because of Joe Rogan's deal with Spotify, but I recognize that this is likely a niche reason.