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With Spotify leading the way in subscriber counts, the number of global music subscribers grew 11.6% to 818.3 million in 2024, according to MIDiA Research’s music subscribers market shares Q4 2024 report. That was about the same number of subscribers added in 2023, but where those new subscribers originated continues to change.
“The continued fast rise of the Global South is the market-defining dynamic, pointing to a rebalancing of the global music industry,” Mark Mulligan, managing director/senior music industry analyst, said in a statement. MIDiA Research defines the Global South as regions other than Europe and North America, where subscription penetration rates and prices are the highest in the world. “Revenues still skew heavily to the West but user growth is now consistently coming from elsewhere.”
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Nearly four out of every five new subscribers added in 2024 came from the mid-tier and emerging markets in the Global South, accounting for 78.4% of the 84.8 million new subscriptions last year and nearly three of five global subscribers overall. In turn, the mature streaming markets in Europe and North America represented 41.0% of global subscribers, down from 52.3% in 2020 and 62.0% in 2015.
The Global South has relatively small but fast-growing regions, often places where streaming has enabled a legal music ecosystem to thrive where little to none existed a decade or two ago. As Billboard reported last week, Mexico replaced Australia as the No. 10 market in 2024, according to the IFPI. The Middle East-North Africa region grew 22.8% while Sub-Sahara Africa improved 22.6%. China, the No. 5 market, grew revenues by 9.6%.
Spotify had a 32.2% share of global subscribers and finished 2024 with 236 million global subscribers, according to its latest earnings release. Spotify had more than double the No. 2 company, China’s Tencent Music Entertainment, which had a 14.7% share based on 121 million subscribers. Tencent Music Entertainment operates Kugou Music, Kuwo Music and QQ Music.
Apple Music was No. 3 at 11.6%, which works out to 95 million subscribers. YouTube Music and Amazon Music were tied for fourth at 10.1%,, or 83 million subscribers, each. Neither Apple Music, YouTube Music nor Amazon Music publicly releases their subscriber counts. YouTube’s latest number of 125 million subscribers announced on March 5 includes both YouTube Music and YouTube Premium, the ad-free tier of the video streaming service.
Apple Music and Amazon Music each lost nearly a percentage point of market share and added fewer subscribers than in the previous year. Of all globally available platforms, YouTube Music was the only major streaming service to post accelerated subscriber growth compared to 2023. That tracks to comments made last year by Universal Music Group CFO Boyd Muir. While Spotify, YouTube [Music] and some regional and local platforms showed “healthy growth,” Muir said during the company’s July 24 earnings call, some other, unnamed platforms “have seen a slowdown in new subscriber additions.”
China’s NetEase Cloud Music was No. 6 at 6.7%, which works out to approximately 55 million subscribers. Russia’s Yandex was No. 7 with a 5.0% share equal to 41 million subscribers. All others—including TIDAL, Qobuz, SoundCloud, Deezer, Napster and South Korea’s Melon—had a combined 9.5% share, which equals roughly 78 million subscribers.
Collaborative Fund and Imaginary Ventures, with additional investment from BMG parent company Bertelsmann and superstar manager Guy Oseary, have led a multimillion fundraising round for [cafeteria], a new market research app that pays teens to opine on what they want from top U.S. brands.
Co-founded and led by Rishi Malhotra — known for creating India’s top streaming platform JioSaavn — Malhotra says [cafeteria] gleans marketing insights from a critical mass of teenagers through open-ended, one-on-one conversations that could start with questions like, “What do you wish McDonald’s had on its menu?” or “What do you think of this Billie Eilish song?”
Major brands can use the conversations with teens to glean insights — for example, teens on average say they are willing to pay $314 to see their favorite artist live — or identify trends before they’re trendy — like Canadian singer songwriter Tate McCrae, which teens were talking about in February, says Malhotra, whose co-founders on the app are former Luminary execs Mark Silverstein and Leeann Sheely.
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“Once something is already a trend, it might be a little late. But when something is pre-trend it’s very actionable,” says Malhotra, who came up with the idea for [cafeteria] by observing his own teenage children. “There is also future testing (applications), like, what do you think about this record?”
[cafeteria] soft-launched three months ago and now has a few thousand users in 39 U.S. states and 60 cities. On average they spend five minutes at [cafeteria]’s virtual “tables” — chat rooms where they answer artificial intelligence-generated questions either by text or voice note. While teens do earn money for providing feedback, Malhotra said they do not expect this to be a major money-making endeavor for its participants.
The seed funding round was led by Collaborative Fund, investors in Beyond Meat, Lyft and Sweetgreen, and Imaginary Ventures, investors in Skims, Glossier and Daily Harvest, followed by Oseary, an early investor in Peloton who leads the venture capital firm Sound Ventures with Ashton Kutcher, which has stakes in Uber, Airbnb, Spotify, Pinterest, Robinhood, and others.
The [cafeteria] app
[cafeteria]
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