Subscription-based music-streaming increased by 32% in 2019

Counterpoint Research has found that the music-streaming market grew by 32% YoY in the calendar year of 2019 (CY2019). This new report also found that the top 5 brands in this space were Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tencent Music and YouTube Music, with 35%, 19%, 15%, 11% and 6% of a share (in terms of subscription counts) respectively.

The market research group attributes these services' success to their ability to convert registerees into paid subscribers. For example, they leverage the incentive to remove ads or other disruptions during playback, which  appears to be very effective. In addition, Apple is credited as mindful of its non-hardware business and how best to build it.

Tactics such as these helped the market to accrue a total of 358 million subscriptions in CY2019. However, Counterpoint also now projects that this number will grow by at least 92 million throughout CY2020. This would represent a growth of about 25% YoY, a change likely to be influenced by the public health crisis related to the Covid-19 pandemic.