How Are Teens Listening To Music?

If you believe the recent Piper Jaffray report that shows that MP3’s in all their early-aught glory are still the preferred method for kids to listen to music, you may not have gotten the full picture. While the survey includes streaming sites like Pandora, lumping other streaming sites like Spotify into “other,” it leaving out glaring omissions. Where’s SoundCloud Where’s YouTube.

A Nielsen report from two years ago showed that YouTube was teen’s go-to place for listening to music for 64 percent of respondents, although that report excluded streaming altogether.

Due to ommisions from of these prominent reports, what we actually know about teen’s music listening preferences are murky and unreliable. So what do we believe

Based on what we know from Nielsen’s most recent report on the matter, we know that digital music sales have come down by 6 percent and streaming has increased by 32 percent, in direct conflict with Piper Jaffray’s purported 13 percent increase in MP3 listeners. We would be less inclined to believe that the MP3 business is somehow booming and more inclined to believe that music is going in the direction of the cloud, through streaming.

The proclivity of these surveys to exclude streaming or lump types of streaming into an innocuous pile called “other” doesn’t reflect reality. For a more accurate picture, we need to break out streaming as a category and pay attention to where the shift in music is actually taking place.