Spotify Users Buy Lots of Music Compared to People Who Aren't Down with the Green
posted Saturday Sep 29, 2012 by Nicholas DiMeo
Despite the company's love for Windows Phone, an open platform and great partnerships with big names, Spotify still manages to get a bad rap. Be it the lack of pay for the artists who deliver the content to the platform or due to the periodic outages, vinyl lovers everywhere are always quick to knock the European-based company more than the rest of the music streaming services. The good news is that the NPD recognizes that people listen to digital music and look at guys like Pandora and Spotify with an unbiased eye. This week, NPD had some good news for the boys in green as far as what Spotify's subscribers end up doing after they listen to a track on the service.
One of NPD Group's analysts, Russ Crupnick, said that since the landing of Spotify here in the States just over a year ago, Spotify listeners are actually twice as likely to go and purchase a song on iTunes or Amazon that they've heard. The best part? Those listeners are not the paid subscribers and are listening free.
I can tell you that we see Spotify (I'm talking free) users more than twice as likely to be buying digital downloads compared to non-users, and that ratio has not changed since the introduction in Q3 '11.
So while an artist may only make pennies per play on Spotify each time a user presses play on a song, they're getting 40% of whatever purchases that same user may make. It's time to chow down on some stats.
- 38% of Spotify users report buying a song download in the past 3 months, compared to 17% for non-users (of Spotify).
- 36% of the tracks that Spotify users acquire are from paid download stores, a 'reasonably steady' number. (The rest is CDs, borrowing and burning/ripping, BitTorrent, etc.)
Crupnick says once NPD is able to trend a full year of Spotify's growth and usage, it will be able to drill-down more specifics on how much Spotify is impacting sales in the music industry. I'm just excited to see a company that I absolutely stand behind do so well. The service is great, they show a tremendous amount of love and support to their developers and they offer up a ridiculous amount of music and podcasts that listeners otherwise wouldn't know about. Click the source link below to read up on the entire report, which does include stats about Pandora's usage, the iTunes user experience and more. I just felt it was only right to be one of the few who will give the positive nod to Spotify when they're doing well.