Fierce Competition Among Spotify, Amazon, Apple, And Google Revealed

Streaming services have changed the way people consume music and musicians attract fam. With just a tap of your touchscreen, you can access millions of tracks. Discovering new artists and bands and finding favorites has never been easier. You can stream music over a mobile network or the internet. Besides, downloading your favorite track to a device makes it available for offline listening.

Numerous streaming services offer unlimited access to a wide range of music catalogs. Media and entertainment-focused research and analysis agency Midia Research listed the world’s top streaming services in its report. The agency used data obtained from market analysis of music streaming during the second quarter of 2021.

According to the streaming music report, Spotify was the largest streaming service, with a 31% market share. In the second position was Apple Music, with 15%, while Tencent Music and Amazon Music ranked third, each with 13%. However, the market shares and the exact number of subscribers might have changed over the months following the study period.

Midia’s report provided more information about how big the world’s leading streaming services are compared to each other. At the end of every quarter, Spotify officially releases the number of its subscribers. Contrarily, the music streaming giant’s competitors, Apple and Amazon, are not as open with the exact figures of their users. Their latest official figures are from 2019 and 2020, respectively, and compiled by Music Ally.

Apple And Amazon Music Reported 15 And 13 Percent Market Shares Respectively

According to Midia, the total number of music streaming subscribers in the second quarter of 2021 was 523.9 million. Based on this claim, Spotify had about 162.4 million users paying for music streaming services on the platform. However, the official figure released by the company during this period was 165 million.

Based on Midia’s estimations for the quarter, Apple Music had nearly 8.6 million subscribers. The China-exclusive Tencent Music and Amazon Music each have slightly more than 68.1 million users. With about 41.9 million subscribers, YouTube Music ranks fifth with a market share of 8%.

Midia claimed that the music streaming market is continuously growing. It experienced an increase of 26.4% in Q2 of 2021. The agency revealed that Spotify’s market share dipped a year earlier. It decreased from 33% in the second quarter of 2020 to 31% in the same period of 2021. However, competitors may not overtake its dominance in the music streaming market soon.

During the same period, YouTube Music and Amazon outperformed Spotify. The former’s growth jumped by over 50% compared to the immediate past year. Emerging markets were also growing strongly. Tencent, Yandex, and NetEast increased by a combined 37%. These figures are also from the market analysis of Q2 of 2021.

The reported numbers may not reflect the full impact lossless audio streaming had throughout the year. For instance, in May, Amazon ceased extra charges for lossless streaming. In the same vein, Apple Music added spatial audio streaming features and lossless quality in June. Spotify’s announcement of its lossless audio streaming made a big splash. Unfortunately, the platform’s Hi-Fi tier was not available as planned during its release window in 2021.