A few days ago I saw a campaign on Twitter that encouraged us to listen to more records, records in physical format. And it is that every time we use less the physical format, and every time we buy less music even with digital music. And it is that more and more we use streaming music services, the data says so and today we can already know the 2019 ranking of music streaming services. Apple Music follows in the wake of Spotify and ranks as the second most used music service in 2019.
In general, music streaming services grew 32% during 2019, reaching a whopping 358 million subscribers according to the study published by Counterpoint Research. Spotify is still the king of the market 35% of the market, But Apple Music follows closely, having reached 19% of the total market last year. A service that continues to grow year after year with Amazon Music or Youtube Music following in its footsteps.
Spotify maintained its first place with the help of promotional activities such as Spotify Premium free for three months, price cuts, personalized campaigns like Spotify and a focus on exclusive content. Tech giants like Amazon, Apple, Google have started to focus on streaming music and have enough cash at their disposal to give Spotify stiff competition. Apple Music is making improvements to its application, such as the introduction of night mode, playlists selected to target a group, etc.. Similarly, Amazon Music has been testing lossless music and is creating its own niche where it competes with Tidal.
And if we go back to the changes in consumption, it must be said that More than 80% of the subscribers are paid, something that indicates that in the end users prefer to pay the necessary fees, whether there are promotions or not, to have all the music catalogs at their fingertips. In addition, the interesting thing is that this competition is based on the characteristics of each service since at the catalog level they are all very similar. We will see how this year 2020 progresses and if Apple Music continues to dominate the market in the difficult sector of streaming music.