Midia Research has published its latest estimates for the size of the global music streaming subscriptions market, with figures from the end of the first quarter of this year.
No surprise who is leading: the company estimates that Spotify’s 158 million subs at the end of March – an official figure from the company’s last financials – gave it a 32% share of the 487 million music subscribers globally.
Behind that, there are updated forecasts for Spotify’s rivals. Midia reckons that Apple Music ended Q1 with a 16% market share – around 77.9 million subscribers – followed by Amazon Music’s 13% share (63.3 million) and the same 13% rounded-percentage share for Tencent Music (which reported 60.9 million ‘online music paying users’ for Q1).
However, Midia claims that it was fifth-placed YouTube Music that is the fastest-growing subscription service, growing by 60% in 2020, and reaching an 8% market share in Q1 this year –just under 39 million subscribers. That would be a decent rise from the 30 million reported by the company for Q3 2020, which was a figure split between subs to YouTube Music Premium and YouTube Premium – the latter of which includes the former.
“Google’s YouTube Music has been the standout story of the music subscriber market for the last couple of years, resonating both in many emerging markets and with younger audiences across the globe,” suggested Midia’s Mark Mulligan. “The early signs are that YouTube Music is becoming to Gen Z what Spotify was to Millennials half a decade ago.”
TikTok might disagree, but YouTube’s efforts to compete with its upstart short-form video rival are continuing. The company announced that its own short-form feature, YouTube Shorts, expanded to Africa this July. This is part of an expansion to more than 100 countries, with Shorts now generating 6.5bn daily video views – a figure first announced in June.
Shorts is a key weapon in the battle for the hearts of Gen Z, but the global music DSPs are also continuing to bolster their efforts in ‘high-potential’ markets. According to Midia, between them, Latin America, Asia Pacific, and the ‘Rest of World’ region accounted for 60% of 2020’s growth in music streaming subscribers.
culled from Music Ally.
