At the moment, Spotify is the leader in terms of music streaming. Apple is catching up and last we heard, they had about 60 million subscribers. However, it seems that a dark horse that could be quickly catching up is none other than Amazon Music, where according to the Financial Times, Amazon Music is growing pretty fast.
The report claims that Amazon Music grew by about 70% in 2018 and boasted about 32 million subscribers. Granted, this is still far behind from the likes of Apple and Spotify, but assuming they’ll be able to maintain their growth, they should catch up pretty fast. The report goes on to add that Spotify themselves are growing at a slower rate at about 25% per year.
Amazon Music is kind of late to the game where the service was only launched in 2016. Similar to Apple Music, Amazon also has the advantage of its Echo customers in which Amazon Music Unlimited has been optimized for. It also seems that Amazon is appealing to an older crowd, where 14% of their subscribers are aged 55 and older, versus Spotify in which subscribers aged 55 and over only make up about 5% of their user base.
According to Amazon Music’s head, Steve Boom, “We’re not battling for the same customers as everyone else. For the industry to reach its full potential, we can’t just look at 15- to 22-year-olds.” There are reports that Amazon has plans to launch a hi-fidelity option of Amazon Music. They are also reported to be planning a set of new Echo speakers with better audio quality.
Filed in . Read more about Amazon, Entertainment, Music and Spotify. Source: engadget