The online music streaming services in the world enjoyed a good year in 2019, with the number of paid subscribers growing by 32% YoY, crossing 350 million. Driving this growth was exclusive content offerings like podcasts and originals, price cuts in subscriptions in emerging markets and bundled offers from telecommunication companies.
The top three companies globally continue to be Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Prime Music. Spotify claimed a share of 31% share of the total revenue and a 35% share of the total paid subscriptions while Apple Music’s subscription base grew by 36% YoY. Amazon Prime Music accounted for 15% of market share in 2019, growing from the 10% it had in 2018.
While global companies did well, regional companies did extremely well too. For example, Gaana remains at number one in India, Yandex Music topping in Russia, Anghani leading in the Arab countries and Tencent Music Group leads the Chinese market. Both global and regional companies are focussing on producing original content and podcasts as a way of keeping its customers as paid subscribers. This is largely due to the fact that 80% of music streaming revenue came from paid subscriptions.
Commenting on the market, Research Analyst, Abhilash Kumar, said:
Paid subscriptions grew 32% YoY compared to 23% YoY growth of total MAUs. This suggests people are ready to pay for music streaming for a hassle-free experience. However, this is not completely user-driven. Music streaming platforms are following a two-step approach to gain subscribers, first registering them to their platform as free users by means of excellent advertising campaigns and secondly pitching them with attractive offers to transfer them to become paying subscribers