Music Streaming: Youtube Beats Spotify

71 percent of Swiss consumers use at least one online platform that specializes in music streaming. That figure is revealed by the new, representative Swiss streaming survey by moneyland.ch, which included 1538 participants. The number of consumers who used music streaming services has remained more or less stable since 2022. In that year, use of music streaming increased significantly compared to 2021.

Youtube ahead of Spotify and Apple Music

All music streaming offers from the video streaming platform Youtube combined currently have the lead, with 73 percent of Swiss consumers using them to listen to music. However, only 22 percent of consumers use the specialized music streaming offer Youtube Music Premium, which takes third place among pure music streaming platforms.

52 percent of Swiss consumers use Spotify. That makes the Swedish platform the most widely-used service which exclusively offers music streaming. Apple Music, which is used by 25 percent of consumers, takes second place among music streaming services, by a wide distance. It is followed by Soundcloud (20 percent), Amazon Music (17 percent), Deezer (16 percent), Tidal (13 percent), and Napster (13 percent).

Table 1: Music streaming platforms by users

*Youtube Music Premium was not included as a separate service in the 2021 survey.

Willingness to pay is low

Only 39 percent of the 1538 survey participants pay to use music streaming platforms. 25 percent of participants pay for Spotify. Only around half of all Spotify users pay for the service. The rest of them either use the free version, or borrow a login from a paying user. With other platforms, paying customers make up an even smaller portion, as shown by the table below.

Tabelle 2: Portion of customers who pay for services

By comparison, more than 65 percent of Netflix users pay for the video-streaming service. "Unlike conventional video streaming platforms, there are free music streaming offers," explains moneyland.ch telecom expert Ralf Beyeler. Many music streaming platforms have free options, most of which include advertisements.

Swiss consumers who do opt for a paid service generally limit themselves to a single paid subscription from one streaming service. Only around 10 percent of participants pay for more than one subscription. "While video streaming platforms offer exclusive content, that practice is hardly used by music streaming platforms," clarifies Beyeler. "So there is almost no reason to pay for multiple subscriptions."

Spotify is less popular in the Romandie

Spotify is also the most popular music streaming platform in French -speaking Switzerland, but is used by somewhat less consumers (48 percent) than in German-speaking regions (53 percent). Apple Music, on the other hand, has more users in the Romandie (29 percent) than in German-speaking Switzerland (23 percent).

Table 3: Music streaming by linguistic region

Weitere Informationen:
Tips for streaming music in Switzerland