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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: 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.