As of the second quarter of 2021, Spotify was the largest music streaming service in the world with a market share of 31 percent, Apple Music in second place with 15 percent, and Amazon Music and Tencent Music each finished in third place with 13 percent each. That is according to a report from Midia Research, a media and entertainment focused research and analysis firm.
While the exact number of subscribers and market shares may have changed in the months since the second quarter of 2021 (use of older data is due to the time the market analysis process takes, Midia tells us), the report sheds light on how the world’s largest music streaming services are piling up against each other. While Spotify releases official subscriber numbers at the end of each quarter (most recently in October last year), competitors like Apple and Amazon are less quick with exact numbers, and the most recent official figures compiled by Music Ally are from 2019 and 2020 respectively.
Based on Midia’s claim that there were a total of 523.9 million music streaming subscribers in the second quarter of 2021, this suggests Spotify had just over 162.4 million subscribers paying for its music streaming service (although the official figure of the company for the second quarter was 165 million). Midia estimates that Apple Music would reach nearly 78.6 million subscribers for the quarter, and Amazon Music and China-exclusive Tencent Music at just over 68.1 million each. YouTube Music follows in fifth place with a market share of 8 percent, which corresponds to 41.9 million subscribers.
According to Midia, the music streaming market continues to grow, growing 26.4 percent from the second quarter of last year. While Spotify’s lead lead means it’s unlikely to be caught up anytime soon, Midia notes that its market share fell from 33 percent in Q2 2020 to 31 percent in Q2 2021, with growth being outpaced by Amazon and YouTube Music. , the latter by more than 50 percent compared to a year earlier. Growth in emerging markets was also reportedly strong, with Yandex, Tencent and NetEast growing together at 37 percent.
Since these numbers are from the second quarter of last year, they are unlikely to show the full impact of the lossless changes to audio streaming made last year. For example, Apple Music added lossless quality and spatial audio streaming features in June, while Amazon stopped charging additional fees for lossless streaming in May. Despite making a big splash with its own lossless audio announcement, Spotify’s new Hi-Fi tier missed its planned 2021 release window.