More Than 771,000 Songs are Played on Spotify Every Minute

2016 was a good year for streaming services. Apple Music saw significant growth, along with Spotify and Pandora. One of the more shocking statistics though that came out of annual industry reports is the fact that Spotify users were playing nearly 771,000 songs per minute on the service. Coupled with growth in the first quarter of 2017, it’s safe to say that the streaming service by itself will be closing in on one million songs per minute by the end of the year.

The music streaming service has logged over 50 million paying subscribers, outstripping the aforementioned Apple Music and Pandora. However, Apple Music does seem to be growing at a faster pace than Spotify, with around 23 million in April thanks to an expanded marketing program, up from 20 million at the beginning of December.

Worldwide, there are about 100 million paying subscribers to some type of streaming music service. This means that if we were to extrapolate the data from Spotify – itself having around half of the market share, it’s not a stretch to imagine about 1.5 million songs being streamed worldwide every minute. That doesn’t even take into account satellite radio streams or legacy forms of music distribution.

It shows that for musicians who are struggling to make a name for themselves or get their music in front of listeners, there is hope. Getting on a curated playlist at any of the major streaming sites can propel an artist’s fan count well into the tens of thousands in just a day.

As many musicians have documented, royalties from streaming services generally aren’t very high, making it more about building a listener base as opposed to making a legitimate musician’s salary just through music streaming services.

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