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The latest statistics on the behavior of streaming subscribers are upending conventional understandings of how and why we consume music.
Last week, media and technology analysis firm MIDiA Research released an infographic on streaming users' listening habits. According to the graphic, 58% of streaming subscribers listen to an individual album or track only a few times, while 60% of subscribers engage in this behavior due to the desire to discover more new music. These numbers are significantly higher compared to the 30% and 27%, respectively, of overall music consumers with those attitudes, implying that paying subscribers tend to exhibit more casual listening behavior.
These findings put into question historical understandings of music fandom, and have particular urgency in today's music landscape where streaming revenues are surpassing physical sales for the first time. Indeed, streaming is one of the fastest-growing music formats today: the 2014 Nielsen Music U.S. Report declared record levels of on-demand audio streaming in 2014 at 78.6 billion streams, a 60% increase from 2013. Spotify itself has over 20 million paying subscribers as of June 2015, a 100% increase from the previous year.
[...] The prominence of streaming services is leading to the emergence of a new dichotomy of superfandom in music—the artist superfan versus the streaming superfan (a.k.a. the paying streaming subscriber). A standard framework for understanding the artist superfan is laid out in the film "Super Fans: The Future of the Music Industry." Co-produced by direct-to-fan music platform PledgeMusic and online education company Lynda.com, the video defines superfans as those who are willing to pay the most to connect on a deeper level with artists, and provides action items for artists to maximize their superfans' engagement. First, artists themselves need to work toward increasing their own exposure, "one fan at a time," instead of relying on labels to do the job. Second, artists need to foster bidirectional conversation with their listeners and foster a personal relationship that extends beyond music.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 13 2015, @07:43PM
So to put it into 'old foggy' ideas.
You had a dude who was really into one band. They would buy every album that band came out with or related to. All the merch, t-shirts, lighters, whatever.
Then the other kind of person. Where they surf around and buy a little of this and a little of that as their mood changes.
Depending on the volume of records the band the superfan has access to that could be from 5 to 20 albums they buy. Where as the voyeur it going to buy dozens of albums to get 1 song or that one they heard on the radio a few days ago.
More than likely the voyeur over their lifetime will buy more. As they can never get to 'complete set'. As they are just going from one idea to the next.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Friday November 13 2015, @10:48PM
I think it is a bit more than that. The streaming fan doesn't buy albums, they buy "music", and the article suggests they are more likely to be fans of "music" rather than a particular genre or band. It also suggests that musicians need to engage more directly with this sort of fan, presumably to convert them into the sort of fan that goes to gigs etc. - which is where bands make money these days.
This makes sense - it is what the successful youtubers do, for example. Expect it to be resisted by the usual suspects though - because it is one more nail in the coffin of the traditional record label. The labels want to own the fan-band relationship, but they won't in this case, the band and the streaming platform will. No sympathy though, the labels had the chance to build and be the download and then the streaming platforms, instead they fought against them at every turn.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday November 14 2015, @03:42AM
musicians need to engage more directly with this sort of fan, presumably to convert them into the sort of fan that goes to gigs etc.
That is a tough conversion. Gigs are in one place, and never available when you just happen to want to listen to a particular song, or even a particular artist. It almost always involves travel, tickets, hotel. And maybe the fan can afford one or two gigs a year, unless they want to spend their life in an smokey Indian casino listening to 60s has-beens.
Its not a practical way to consume music.
Look, there is a reason mankind invented recordings. It isn't going to go away in favor of any kind of live in person performance.
The live-ish performance might get a boost when there are 4000 channels streaming live-ish nightly-ish performances like pay-per-view or something. I suppose that would be something like a Super-YouTube, or Live-performance-Netflix.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.