Earlier this week, we reported on figures published by research firm eMarketer, suggesting that Spotify might overtake Pandora for US listeners by 2021. Now the company has broken out some more of its predictions for the US market, this time focusing on Amazon’s music-streaming business.
“Amazon Music will cross 35 million monthly listeners in the US this year. At a growth rate of 17.7% year over year, we expect it will grow faster than any other digital audio service in our forecast,” claimed analyst Blake Droesch in a blog post. In fact, eMarketer thinks Amazon Music will end 2018 with 35.8 million listeners in the US, before that grows to 39.4 million by the end of 2020, and 41.8 million by the end of 2021.
eMarketer hasn’t (publicly) broken these figures down into Prime Music and Amazon Music Unlimited listeners, although it did cite the Amazon Prime membership program as a driving force behind the growth – eMarketer expects more than half of all US households to have Prime this year.
The company is also mulling what this all means for brands. “Amazon’s audio platform is subscription-only and not supported by ads at any membership level; neither is Apple Music, the second fastest-growing digital audio platform. This means that the fastest-growing segment of audio streaming listeners cannot be reached by advertisers…”
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…