Why YouTube Music Is A Worthy Challenger For Spotify

Reckon YouTube Music can’t topple Spotify’s reign as the go-to for music in Australia? The data says you’re wrong.

Roy Morgan Single Source, who completely the survey, conduct in-depth face-to-face interviews with 1,000 Australians each week, 50,000 each year. It says research conducted directly with real people is “qualitatively and quantitatively more valuable” than information drawn only through automated processes from web browsers and complicated algorithms.

“It’s the only way to learn how many real people – not bots, devices, clicks, or impressions – visit a site,” Roy Morgan says.

But anyway, back to music and how we listen to it.

Spotify is currently visited by 2.2 million Australians a month – 69 per cent more than this time last year. Nice. SoundCloud gets 1.3 million visitors in the same time period. Triple M is the highest ranked radio station, coming in third with just over 520,000 visitors to its site.

Apple Music and Google Play Music both have just under 400,000 visitors to their sites. i think we can safety assume that Google Play Music will eventually be rolled in to YouTube Music.

Compare YouTube tot he current leading music and radio websites, and you see over 15.2 million Australians are visiting the site every month – that’s 70 per cent of Australia’s adult population.

Australia’s Top 10 Music and Radio websites visitation in an average four weeks – March 2017 cf. March 2018
Source: Roy Morgan Single Source: March 2017, n=4,000, March 2018, n = 4,008 Australians aged 14+. Note: These visitation figures are not derived from cookies, device counts, impressions or clicks.

Roy Morgan research has concluded that with YouTube’s huge reach amongst the Australian population it is inevitable that “a substantial proportion” of those who visit existing radio and music sites will also visit the YouTube site in an average month.

“Analysing data on the leading radio and music websites in the 12 months to March 2018 shows that 98 per cent of those who visit the Vevo music website also visit YouTube and 95.8 per cent of market leader Spotify’s website visitors also visit YouTube,” the research reads.

Over 90 per cent of visitors to the Apple Music, SoundCloud and 3AW Melbourne 693 sites also visit YouTube.

Source: Roy Morgan Single Source: April 2017 – March 2018, n = 50,014 Australians aged 14+.

Michele Levine, CEO of Roy Morgan, says YouTube Music presents a clear threat to the audiences of Spotify and SoundCloud.

“Over 5 million Australians now visit radio and music sites in an average four weeks led by streaming music service Spotify with nearly 2.2 million visitors and rival SoundCloud with over 1.3 million visitors.” Says Levine.

“In an increasingly interconnected and online world the ability of giant technology companies such as Google/YouTube, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and the like to enter new markets and challenge existing players means those already in the market need to stay on top of exactly who and where their customers are.”