Streaming Sites
With a plethora of options to choose from, it can be overwhelming as a listener and a music producer about which platforms to focus on. It's impossible to be able to maintain all of them unless you have a team around you and that's pretty much unfeasible for solo artists trying to make a name for themselves so often it's a case of picking one and growing an audience on that platform.
For me, I have pretty much focused on these 3 sites for music sharing and listening - Hive, Twitter and Spotify - because I simply don't have enough hands or ears to be anywhere else along with co-running the Electronic Music Alliance, Platform Project and the Your Top 3 monthly contest.
Anyway, let's get our science heads on and do a little study on streaming sites shall we?
Method
It's always interesting to see where others focus on and so I popped up a poll that asked followers and friends on Twitter & Facebook, "Which platform is your go to for listening to music?" Fellow EMA Co-Founder also did a similar poll soon after so I used the replies from his as well to get a bigger picture and here are the results:
Results
There were a total of 184 votes across the 3 polls with comments/replies when voted on "other" taken in to consideration by manually checking. Although there were 128 votes in my poll, there were 12 unaccounted for in the results because they didn't follow up in the comments about where they voted.
Discussion
Spotify On Top
Well, swooping in with well over half of the votes is stream king Spotify with 105 out of 184 votes (57%) for it. It's no surprise with the convenience, its algorithms seems to be spot on for finding new music that you'd like and it's really easy to use - just open the app and stream away.
Soundcloud, YouTube & Bandcamp
I was surprised to see YouTube get so many votes, particularly on my own poll as it was a clear 2nd there but didn't get much support on Davey's poll. In fact, Soundcloud did the worst on my poll but seemed a few of Davey's followers enjoy using the site which meant these two platforms shared 2nd place in the wake of Spotify.
Bandcamp came close to the podium with many people commenting that they much prefer using this site. I looked at each profile of those who commented about Bandcamp and it seems that every one was a musician so it would have been good to see if non-musicians find this site as good to listen to music.
The Others
Not many Apple users apparently in this poll with only 3% of the votes coming in for them and slim pickings for Mixcloud, Internet Radio, Pandora, TIDAL, Amazon Prime and Emanate, which all only picked up 6% of the total votes between them.
Cryptocurrency Sites Have a Long Way To Go
With only one person commenting about Emanate, which is a pretty new platform to be fair and still under development, it seems that there's a long way to go for these blockchain sites to even catch up to those more recognised names that didn't get many votes. Someone mentioned Choon in jest (I think haha) which was another site that had a lot of promise but fell apart and closed causing a big earthquake in several music communities.
I may do another poll about cryptocurrencies at a later date but one of the reasons I use Hive is because I can share my music via Spotify there, followers or people who enjoy it give it a like 👍 or ❤️ (which has a small monetary value), they also comment, which I can give a like 👍 or ❤️ back to say "thanks for being a legend" and the whole thing has a positive spiral.
Some have even bought my music with Hive tokens, which is possible just from commenting on posts so there's a ton of potential but I'll talk about this more in another blog:
Conclusion
Well, it seems that Spotify is still king for music discovery from this poll which had close to 200 votes. Not saying that we have had a complete representation of the hundreds of millions of people's listening habits but I may keep this spreadsheet open and do more polls as time goes on to see how it changes!
Thanks to everyone who got involved with the polls - good fun wasn't it!
Catch you soon
Nicky
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