Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Friday November 13 2015, @07:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the AKA-groupie? dept.

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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 13 2015, @08:54PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 13 2015, @08:54PM (#262826)

    Why. Pandora is Free?

  • (Score: 2) by Tramii on Friday November 13 2015, @09:00PM

    by Tramii (920) on Friday November 13 2015, @09:00PM (#262832)

    You can't play songs on demand with Pandora. For example, you can't play a certain song 50 times in a row.

    • (Score: 2) by JeanCroix on Friday November 13 2015, @09:04PM

      by JeanCroix (573) on Friday November 13 2015, @09:04PM (#262835)
      That's what YouTube is for.
      • (Score: 2) by Celestial on Friday November 13 2015, @09:28PM

        by Celestial (4891) on Friday November 13 2015, @09:28PM (#262841) Journal

        YouTube's music quality is crap. I gladly pay for a Spotify Premium family plan. 320KB Ogg Vorbis on-demand streaming FTW.