Since its launch in Australia last May, Australians have streamed a staggering 42.5 million hours of music on Swedish music service Spotify, (that’s over 4,000 years worth of music) and with that, users have created over 14 million playlists.
Those statistics arrive in celebration of their Spotify’s one year birthday down under, in conjunction with the announcement, the popular music streaming service is introducing an embedded charts system that provides weekly updates on the most streamed and shared songs on their service in Australia each week.
Spotify Charts will act as a running music feed with users able to choose either the most streamed, or most shared tracks of the week on the streaming service. This is the first time users will have access to raw figures relating to artists’ popularity, which alongside ARIA chart numbers and music news sites, will gather a more comprehensive view on music listening, sharing, and popularity.
Currently trending on Spotify Charts is hyped Frenchsters Daft Punk who hold the number one spot with lead single ‘Get Lucky’, taken off their latest album Random Access Memories. At the time of publication, the single has been streamed 190,387 times this week, with second spot taken out by British folk singer Passenger with his single ‘Let Her Go’, at 114,934 plays.
In fact, 10 more tracks from Daft Punk’s latest LP featured in the Top 50 most streamed tracks of the week, showing the saturation and importance that streaming services like Spotify play in an album’s opening week, a phenomenon seen before with Mumford & Sons and Justin Timberlake.
According to a Spotify press release, hip-hop duo Macklemore & Ryan Lewis are currently holding the top spot of Most Streamed Artist over the past year by Aussie users. The American hip-hop act and Hottest 100 winners are closely followed by acts such as Florence + The Machine, Rihanna, Maroon 5, Coldplay Alt-J, Mumford & Sons and The xx.
Unlike the new Charts service, there are no figures to go along with this news, but from it we did learn that Aussies sure do love home grown talent, with music wunderkind Flume taking the title of Most Streamed Local Artist, with Tame Impala, Guy Sebastian, 360, and The Rubens following closely behind. Spotify Charts will act as a running music feed with users able to choose either the most streamed, or most shared tracks of the week on the streaming service.
ARIA CEO Dan Rosen congratulated the streaming service on their first year in the Australian market stating, “It is has been an exciting 12 months for the Australian music industry as streaming services like Spotify have entered the market, providing Australian music fans with more choice on how they listen to their favourite music and ensuring artists and labels are being rewarded for their creative work.”
The release of Spotify’s figures highlights the boom of such services and their increased popularity in Australia, even after only one year in the game. “I’m so proud of what we’ve achieved in Australia in such a small space of time,” said Spotify’s Australiasian Managing Director, Kate Vale, in a press release. “We’re excited that Aussies are choosing us as their go-to source to discover and consume more music than ever before.”
Speaking with The Australian, Vale has revealed the growth of the service was “ahead of expectations” as Australia has a huge music market. But interestingly, the service, while claiming market dominance, refuses to reveal the size of its user base a year after their launch in Australia.
Ms Vale indicated that approximately a quarter of Spotify’s Australian users are subscription-based members who pay $11.99 a month to enjoy the ad-free service. “Globally we have 24 million (users), six million of which (subscribe),” she revealed. “We don’t break out our numbers by market,” she said, noting the local subscription take-up rate was “in line with” the company’s global rate of 25 per cent.
“In Australia it’s almost exactly the same (take-up rate),” Ms Vale said, “That’s great for a market only one year in. We’re pretty much the firm market leader here now.” Australiasian Manging Director Kate Vale has revealed the growth of the service was “ahead of expectations”… But interestingly, the service, while claiming market dominance, refuses to reveal the size of its user base a year after their launch in Australia.
Ms Vale also told The Australian that music piracy is Spotify’s main competition in the digital music market, rather than online stores like Apple’s iTunes or Google Music, or even similar streaming sites such as Pandora or Rdio. Stemming music piracy is Spotify’s aim, after a study last year by stats tracker MusicMetrics revealed that Australians were the worst downloaders per capita of illegal music, and in a bizarre twist of patriotism, Aussie hip hop pioneers Hilltop Hoods was Australia’s illegal music target of choice.
Despite the lack of actual subscriber figures in Australia, Spotify is generally seen as a market leader, last year the company generated approximately AU$1 billion for the global music industry. The digital music service is currently available in 28 countries, with Australia opening up the Swedish streaming service to the Asian market with sites in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia currently using the digital music service.
After celebrating their first birthday here down under, Spotify has even garnered support from Prime Minster Julia Gillard who put together an eclectic playlist for the site.
With the recent addition of their “Follow” tab, which pushes the digital streaming service into social media territory, Spotify moves their platform into the area of tailored recommendations, a key component of the soon to be released new music service from Beats Electronics and Trent Reznor, codenamed Daisy.
Spotify’s new tab was pioneered by French indie band Phoenix, who partnered with the service, and promoted the convenience of the new social media function, over the previous “People” feature.
Other statistics from the one year anniversary stats show that of the 14 million playlists created over the last year, over 240,000 of them were created about love, romance or sex, confirming the news that Aussies love a sappy love song, with Lionel Ritchie and Diana Ross’ duet ‘Endless Love’ revealed to be the country’s favourite love song. Almost 150,000 playlists were created for exercise or sport, 55,000 wedding themed playlists and around 65,000 playlists made for to get through a long work day.
Spotify were recently the recipients of an ironic hack that allowed its users to download any song currently available from the streaming service directly onto their hard drive.
The aptly dubbed ‘Downloadify’ presented a real nightmare for the digital music service when developers published a Google Chrome extension that exploited a technical faux pas in the encryption and coding of the music service’s web-based player, allowing users to pilfer any of the service’s 20 million strong song library before Spotify managed to update and patch the service, blocking the rogue Downloadify program.
You can view the current Spotify Charts list below:
