Spotify, Pandora, Rdio and Beats Music remain great to-go sources to listening to your favorite tunes on the go, but when it comes to earning profits, some wonder if the sites will have a long life ahead. After all, Spotify hasn’t really posted a profit in some time, and Pandora’s wavers from month-to-month.
However, there’s potential for huge growth, according to numbers provided by Localytics. Between the period of August 2013 and this month, the average time spent with music applications has increased dramatically, by 79 percent. That makes music apps the leader of the pack, especially compared to Health and Fitness (with 51 percent) and Social Networking (44.9 percent). Sitting at the bottom of the chart was News, with only a 14 percent increase.
This is mainly due to the increase in total music revenue generated via streaming, with apps everywhere attempting to include digital downloads from iTunes and other services.
As far as the time that apps are used, music also leads, with an estimated 8.9 minutes per session listened to, and applications being launched around 16.3 times per months. That brings a total of 145 minutes, which is ahead of other categories, including social networking, which sits at 63 minutes per month.
This overall growth not only means good news for such sites as Pandora and Spotify, but also the industry in general. That’s not to say artists will be rolling in the dough individually, but interest continues to grow in music apps and that has to be good for the industry. The difficult issue is still how musicians get fairly compensated for all of this time spent with their music, as many have publicly compained about getting very little in return for allowing their music to be streamed.
What do you think Will Spotify and Pandora lead the charge in a better audience for streaming music services, or do you think users will stick to “bigger boys” like iTunes and Amazon for its downloading services
Source: Pando
