When Amazon Music announced it was adding a free music tier back in April, many predicted the e-retailer’s streaming service would become a bigger threat to industry giants like Spotify and Apple Music. Now those predictions appear to be coming true, with Amazon’s efforts in the music streaming business paving the way for the brand to overtake its biggest competitors.
According to Rolling Stone, Amazon Music is growing three times as fast as top competitor Spotify. The report that Amazon Music Unlimited has increased its subscribers by 70 percent in the last year comes just days after Amazon hosted a high profile concert headlined by superstars including Taylor Swift and Dua Lipa ahead of the company’s annual Prime Day sale. While Spotify still leads in terms of total subscriber count, its rate of growth fell far behind Amazon’s this year at just a 25 percent increase.
Midia Research music analyst Mark Mulligan called Amazon Music the “dark horse” of streaming services and told the Financial Times that “people don’t pay as much attention to it [as to Apple and Spotify], but it’s been hugely effective.”
The streaming service, which was largely dismissed as a Spotify copycat when it first launched in 2016, may owe its surprising success to an unexpected demographic. According to Rolling Stone, Amazon Music shirks the “obvious demographic” of young listeners who are already Spotify loyalists in favor of older, more casual music consumers. A mere five percent of Spotify’s customers are 55 or older, compared to 14 percent of Amazon Music listeners.
As the outlet noted, Amazon execs themselves have admitted that the “middle of the road” streaming service thrives as “a mainstream music-streaming service for the mainstream music fan.”
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