The most popular music streaming platform isn’t Spotify

When you ask about top streaming music services, Spotify and Apple Music are probably the first two that come to mind. You could be followed by Pandora, Deezer, and Amazon Prime Music. While these all have a healthy subscriber base, none of them are the biggest or most popular streaming music service – nowhere near.

YouTube and its two billion monthly active users are crushing all competition in terms of number and popularity. How does YouTube work that Video Streaming service, do you surpass the mighty Spotify when it comes to music? We will tell you.

Start up Spotify

Spotify was founded in 2006 and launched in 2008 and has enjoyed great success worldwide. With 60 million songs, four billion playlists, and 1.9 million podcasts, Spotify is one of the top destinations for music and other audio content.

The popular streaming music service saw its first real growth when it launched in the UK in 2009 and the US in 2011. Spotify reached its first one million paying subscribers across Europe in March 2011. By September that number had doubled to two million that same year. By August 2012, Spotify’s total user base had reached up to 15 million active users, with about four million paying subscribers. By December 2012, the company quickly reached 20 million listeners worldwide and five million paying users – including one million in the US.

See also: 15 tips to get more out of your Spotify Premium account

Spotify’s number continued to skyrocket. In May 2014, the company had a total of 40 million customer bases, with 10 million paying. The meteoric rise continued into the next year. A total of 75 million users paid 20 million. Spotify reached a total of 100 million listeners and 40 million paying subscribers in mid-2016.

Today Spotify has 320 million monthly customers, 144 million of whom are paying for one of Spotify’s premium plans. The service is available in 92 markets worldwide. To put this in perspective, Apple Music, the second largest music service in the world, had around 72 million subscribers in June 2020, reports Statista.

Spotify’s millions cannot be compared to YouTube’s billions

If Spotify’s numbers are impressive, YouTube’s numbers are mind-blowing. The Spotify vs YouTube race isn’t even over. However, there is one small caveat that we will get into later.

Here’s what you need to know. If you don’t count children’s songs as “music videos,” seven of the top ten YouTube videos of all time are music videos. Also, 17 of the top 20, 27 of the top 30, and 37 of the top 40 are music videos. In fact, almost all of the top 100 best YouTube videos of all time are music videos (and not cat content). This gives you a really good idea of ​​what people are using YouTube for. Great artists no longer debut their latest tracks on MTV. No, this honor is reserved for YouTube. Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito”, for example, has 7,087,915,396 views. There are plenty of other names in the top 10 of all time that you might recognize. These include Ed Sheeran, Wiz Khalifa, Mark Ronson / Bruno Mars, Psy, Justin Bieber and Maroon 5.

Connected: Best music streaming apps for Android

YouTube has a distinct advantage: it’s a top internet destination worldwide. In fact, YouTube is the second largest website in the world. It owns the second largest search engine on the web and has more than 30 million active users every day. You see around a billion videos every day. In addition, YouTube accounts for 37% of all Internet traffic and users watch up to 40 minutes on their mobile phones every day.

More importantly, YouTube is natively featured on the vast majority of Android phones sold worldwide. For 2020, IDC expects Android phone shipments of 1.055 billion. For comparison: Spotify ships immediately with relatively few phones. This gives YouTube a big lead over the competition. Google’s video platform is available in more than 80 languages ​​in over 100 countries.

YouTube Music is a different story

Technically, YouTube isn’t a music streaming service. The website’s main product is video, although people certainly use YouTube as a de facto music service. How can they not?

YouTube Music – a stand-alone music streaming service from YouTube – has its own online destination, app, and user base. The service was first released in November 2015. Earlier this year, Play Music was superseded as the main / only music streaming service by Google. Like Spotify and Apple Music, YouTube Music is available in free and paid tiers. It is available in around 95 countries worldwide.

Even so, YouTube Music’s numbers have pales in comparison to other music services, at least for now. According to Google’s latest quarterly report, YouTube Music’s paid subscribers are around 30 million. However, that’s a significant increase from 20 million a year ago. This means that the move from Google Music to YouTube Music YouTube Music quickly brought in 10 million new users.

Read more: YouTube Music vs Spotify: Can Google Keep Up At All?

YouTube Music is clearly a young service that is far ahead of Spotify and Apple Music. However, YouTube is so ahead of any other service that despite its focus on video, it will remain the number one destination for music for the foreseeable future.

This is the twelfth article in our “Did You Know That” series. In it, we dive into the history books of Android and consumer technology to uncover important and interesting facts or events that have been forgotten over time. What would you like to see from us next? Let us know in the comments and check out our previous entries in the series below.