Survey: 35% Of People Currently Use This Music Streaming Service

For the average listener, music streaming services have largely replaced MP3s, which were once the gold standard for collecting and listening to your favorite tunes. Services like Spotify and Apple Music are filled with a constantly-updated library of music that is made remotely available across many different devices, including smartphones, smart TVs, car audio systems, and video game consoles. This means that you don't actually need to collect the individual albums to populate your music library unless you're still interested in doing so because of a personal preference. 

Nowadays, music streaming services are looking for even more ways to add value to their audience. Spotify showed off a roadmap in 2021 that included upcoming features like AI-based mood detection that's expected to change the music based on your specific listening environment, biometrics, and personal background information.

According to Statista, more than 523.9 million people were subscribed to premium music streaming services worldwide as of January 2021. Given the popularity of music streaming, we conducted a random survey that included the responses of over 620 respondents across the United States to find out which music services the average person is most likely to use. It's important to note that without digging much deeper into information about demographics, it's difficult to draw much deeper conclusions about the data or about the respondents themselves. This is a random survey, and some amount of discrepancy should be expected and accounted for in the results.

In our survey, we asked each participant to choose between Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, Pandora Premium, Amazon Music Unlimited, and YouTube Music. The survey's respondents voted largely in favor of Spotify and Apple Music in that order, but there was some attention given to other services like YouTube Music and Amazon Music Limited. The least popular service on our list was Tidal coming in at 3.23% approval, or about 20 respondents out of 620.

Following the aforementioned Tidal service, Pandora Premium came in with an 11.29% approval rating, which was about 70 respondents. The next best was YouTube Music, which had a 13.71% approval representative of about 85 respondents. After that, it was Amazon Music Unlimited with a 16.29% approval rating, which equates to about 101 respondents. Apple Music received a whopping 20% approval rating from 124 respondents. Spotify was the most popular of the bunch, coming in at a 35.48% approval rating, accounting for 220 respondents.

If these results are representative of the general population, then it'd be possible to surmise that there are roughly 185.87 million premium Spotify subscribers in the wild, following the logic that you could take Statista's aforementioned 523.9 million music streaming subscribers and multiply that figure by 35.48% for a ballpark estimate. Regardless, these results are unsurprising, given Spotify has made good on some of its promises to be the most innovative music streaming service — it even allows you to collaboratively make your own playlists alongside your friends and family members, which can be an excellent way to share and expand your musical tastes.