Skip to footer

Spotify unseats Pandora as the world's most popular music service

Spotify is now the most popular streaming music service in the world, according to a new report.

|
Courtesy of Spotify/File
Spotify has passed Pandora to become the most popular streaming music service in the world. Here, Spotify co-founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon are shown in September 2008.

If you’re the kind of person who subscribes to a streaming music service rather than purchasing individual albums, you’ve got a lot of options: Pandora, Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play Music, YouTube Red, and more popping up all the time.

Pandora is one of the oldest services – it was founded in 2000 under the name “Music Genome Project” – and for many years it’s had more active users than any other service. But this week Spotify passed Pandora to become the world’s most popular streaming service, according to a report from App Annie, a mobile analytics firm.

In spite of its growth, Spotify isn’t yet turning a profit. The company lost about $80 million in 2013, down from a $115 million loss in 2012. Spotify says it’s seeking to build an active base of users first, and to convince users using the free ad-supported tier to pay $10 per month for premium subscriptions.

Both services barely edged over 75 million active users in 2015, with Spotify growing considerably faster than Pandora in recent years.

Pandora’s service fills a different niche: rather than offering users a way to search for and stream music, Pandora serves up radio stations curated according to users’ tastes. On Tuesday, Pandora chief executive officer Brian McAndrews argued in an op-ed published in Business Insider that Internet radio services benefit listeners and artists by allowing people to discover new music, but that on-demand streaming services such as Spotify “are driving down music’s intrinsic value by creating a ‘gray market’ ... where listeners can perpetually access licensed, free, on-demand music.”

“This problem is imminently fixable,” Mr. McAndrews says. “Limit free on-demand music to truly trial. Countless other industries successfully convert their consumers from limited-time trials to payments.”

For its part, Spotify is trying several different avenues to convince users to upgrade to paid subscriptions, from traditional advertising to a rumored video service similar to YouTube that would be available to subscribers. And a separate rumor suggests that Spotify might restrict the albums available to free users in order to provide an additional incentive to upgrade.

Pandora is still the top service in the US, thanks to its popularity among users on Android and iOS devices. Smaller services such as Deezer, Saavn, and Gaana are popular in France and India even though Spotify continues to grow in Europe and Asia.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Spotify unseats Pandora as the world's most popular music service
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2015/1201/Spotify-unseats-Pandora-as-the-world-s-most-popular-music-service
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe