Pandora Tops Rapidly Changing US Music Streaming Market

As the music streaming market reacts to the introduction of Pandora Plus, as well as new on-demand services anticipated from Pandora and Amazon, research shows Pandora with the leading share of weekly music streaming hours in the United States in the second quarter of 2016.

Nearly one-third (30 percent) of the time consumers spent streaming music occurred on Pandora, followed by YouTube at 27 percent and Spotify at 18 percent, according to MusicWatch, a company providing consumer research for the music industry. For the paid “on-demand” music subscription segment, Spotify Premium posted a 7 percent share, followed by 2 percent for Apple Music.

“Pandora’s strength in the market represents a major opportunity to migrate listeners to new tiers of services, including on-demand and revised lower-price offerings,” said Russ Crupnick, managing partner of MusicWatch. “At the same time Spotify is leading growth in the on-demand segment. Although Spotify Premium has a lead over Apple Music it is important to keep in mind that Spotify had quite a head start, and many Apple users are still in the trial phase.”

Methodology: The MusicWatch Audiocensus is a monthly tracking study of internet users in the U.S. age 13 and older. The share of listening hours is based on the size of the audience for the respective services and the amount of time users spent listening to that service in an average week.