Spotify – Changing The Way We Listen To Music

Music – starting just as a means of entertainment, now has become an inseparable part of civilized humanity! Music has become so important to us, humans, and has been so for thousands of years. In the early days, programs of music used to take place at some public venues. As time passed, these public places were replaced by concert halls. But, in the last 20 years, there has been an incredible shift; to the online streaming of music. Music streaming applications like Spotify, Amazon Music, and a few more have taken this industry to an unimaginable level!!

Online Streaming – this started out as music piracy industry. Initially, The music industry was dominated by cassette tapes in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1990, India had annual cassette sales of 180 million units, including both legitimate and pirated ones. And, as time passed, a new trend gained momentum – online piracy.

The song libraries of many cassettes were available online, that too free of cost, obviously. Back then, no concrete steps were taken to stop this piracy. After all, the music industry was a mammoth one and small-time piracy couldn’t do much harm to the business. But, who could have thought that someday someone would turn this into a legitimate business?

The industry, which started out as music piracy, became an eleven billion dollar industry, making up 56% of the global industry revenues in 2019. And, one company that became a clear winner globally, in terms of paid subscribers, is Spotify.

Taking on behemoths like Apple, Amazon, and Google, Spotify has dominated the streaming music industry with near about 130M premium subscribers, a little short of Netflix’s number! While according to the data of 2019, Spotify still is behind Apple.

But, Spotify has been on a winning streak recently with the acquisition of Joe Rogan’s incredibly popular podcast, some exclusive deals with the Kardashian and DC Comics, all in an attempt  – to broaden its scope from music streaming to audio giant!

With pandemic affecting much business in a negative way, in Spotify’s case, it has helped them in gaining premium subscribers. Spotify is one of the handfuls of companies that have actually benefitted from the pandemic. This small Swedish startup, which just started as a music streaming application, has certainly proved that no matter the competition if the idea is good then the product will certainly be better and successful!!