Spotify has published a stats roundup for what 2021 looked like for artists on its platform, and one figure jumped out at us straight away. The streaming service highlighted fans “listening to artists’ music for 107,917,574,719 hours this year”. That 107.9bn is something we can work with, while remembering that it covers the ‘Wrapped’ data period from 1 January to 27 November. So, it’s around 9.8bn monthly listening hours.
As a mark of its growth, back in 2015 Spotify was doing 1.7bn monthly listening hours. More maths: at the midpoint of 2021, the service had 365 million monthly active users, so you could guesstimate that individual listeners average just under 296 hours over the period covered by the data – and thus nearly 27 monthly hours each.
Spotify also published a chart of the ‘biggest gainers’ in 2021, referring to artists with at least one million monthly listeners whose audience grew by the highest percentage this year. Masked Wolf – also topping one of TikTok’s main charts for 2021 – headed that list.
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average 27 monthly hours each subscriber, can’t be right?? or am I misreading….
Hello! Here are our workings:
107.9 billion listening hours for January to November
Divide that by 365 million (for active users)
= 295.6 hours per user over that period
Divide THAT by 11 (months)
= 26.9 hours per user per month on average
But we’re always open to the potential of having messed up our maths in some way: why does it seem off?
was not questioning your maths but rather I guess I was surprised at the average, as with most services you will have many lapsed/occasional users(which ruins the average), suggesting that their are many users who are really engaged. the median would be interesting I guess..