According to Insider Intelligence, Amazon Music will surpass Pandora this year to become the second-largest music streaming service in the United States. Users on both paid and ad-supported plans for these services are included in this analysis, thus while Apple Music has an estimated 38.2 million subscribers, compared to Amazon Music’s 52.6 million and Pandora’s 49.1 million, none of Apple’s members are on a free, ad-supported plan.
Spotify continues to be the most popular music streaming service in the United States, with 180 million premium customers and 406 million monthly active users on both paid and free plans. According to Spotify, there are around 93.38 million active users in North America, with 28.8 million paying customers.
It’s difficult to directly compare the size of Pandora’s audience to Spotify’s audience because Spotify’s data don’t break down subscription numbers by nation, but Pandora’s market share has continued to fall. Pandora nevertheless achieved $743 million in gross profit last year, up 30% from 2020.
The product itself has undergone some noticeable upgrades as Amazon Music continues to grow. Last year, both Amazon Music and Apple Music made lossless audio streaming available to all users, a feature that Spotify still lacks and can’t explain.
Amazon has also attempted to improve its audio services by providing synchronised transcriptions to a limited number of programmes. Despite the platform’s content decisions, though, Spotify’s podcast listenership continues to increase rapidly. Spotify doesn’t seem to want to relinquish its grip on the streaming sector, as seen by its recent acquisitions in the podcast industry.