STOCKHOLM, Sweden (CelebrityAccess) – While it might be hard to believe, streaming music service Spotify is celebrating its tenth year and marked the occasion by releasing a collection of interesting data points from its decade-long history of streaming music.
Included in the stats were the latest figures of Spotify’s customer base and the streamer revealed that as of August 31st, it has 180 million active listeners in 65 countries. Those users appear to be an increasingly receptive audience, and Spotify noted that “listening diversity,” or the number of artists the average user streams per month, has risen on Spotify over the past 10 years at an average of about 8 percent per year.
In the past three years alone, listening diversity increased about 40 percent on the strength of new personalized and editorial playlists—meaning people are listening to an increased number of artists on a regular basis, Spotify said.
Spotify also took the opportunity to tout the scope of their content library, which they say includes more than 40 million songs and podcasts, and 3 billion-plus user-created playlists.
As well, Spotify looked at the diversity of its content library, noting that, to date, over 2,000 genres have been identified in its library, among them Wonky (electronic music characterized by synths with unusual time signatures), Shimmer Pop (a marriage of indie pop and electronica from Sweden, and British Blues, which, unsurprisingly, is blues music with a distinctly British sensibility.
Since launch, users have streamed more than 16,858,080 years of continuous music on the service.
As for which artists are being streamed, the answers were not very surprising. As of Sep. 1st, Drake stands out as the single most streamed artist, followed by Ed Sheeran, Eminem, The Weeknd, and Rihanna. Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” holds the title for the most streamed track, and the British singer-songwriter also holds the record for most streamed albums, while Rihanna was the first artist to top 1 billion streams on the service.
Spotify also included a list of the most-streamed tracks by year since they launched, providing an interesting snapshot of the musical zeitgeist of the last decade.
2008: The Killers – “Human”
2009: The Black Eyed Peas – “I Gotta Feeling”
2010: Eminem, Rihanna – “Love The Way You Lie”
2011: Don Omar, Lucenzo – “Danza Kuduro”
2012: Gotye, Kimbra – “Somebody That I Used To Know”
2013: Macklemore & Ryan Lewis – “Can’t Hold Us” (feat. Ray Dalton)
2014: Pharrell Williams – “Happy” – from Despicable Me 2
2015: Major Lazer, MØ, DJ Snake – “Lean On”
2016: Drake – “One Dance”
2017: Ed Sheeran – “Shape of You”
