Arnbjorn Marklund | PussyJazz

What does music subscription services (i.e. Napster, Spotify, TDC Play, Grooveshark) mean for music consumption and listening habits?

October-December 2009 I spent quite a lot of time together with 3 other guys researching music listening habits amongst (primarily) students at the IT-University in Copenhagen, Denmark. The report is based on quantitative research with 203 responds. It was an exam paper in “Media & Communication”, a masters level course at ITU.

With Spotify and its likes, legal music streaming and subscription services are becoming widely available, although Denmark up until now has lagged behind with only one commonly known service available, TDC Play, which is only available to the people who subscribe to the company’s broadband, cable or mobile services.

Today I found a good excuse to publish the report, as it came to my knowledge that KODA in Denmark are informing the public that the Digital Music Report 2010 by IFPI contains unfortunate information. Not cool! But, by reading the news posting by KODA, you may get the impression that there’s a lot of online music subscription services in Denmark – a statement I have to say I do not understand. There might be food on the table, but no one wants to eat it.

Overall findings in the report.

The over all figures in our survey shows rather surprisingly that 32% are using a subscription service, this despite the already before mentioned fact that very few such services are legally available in Denmark. The survey also shows that TDC Play is the only fully legal service Danish consumers seem to use. However, more than 80% use a service that is either not legal or not available in Denmark, meaning the user will either have to fake their IP address or do other technical “tweaks” in order to use the service. This shows that there is a demand from the users to have access to music subscription services. It also shows that TDC Play is far from satisfying for Danish music consumers.

What was even more surprising was that when comparing the two groups (the subscribers and the non-subscribers), there were no significant differences in their responses to how they consume music, how important music is, how much they listen to music on the radio, to CD’s, on the computer, or how much they download illegally. This said, 43% of the people using a subscription service, said that they download illegally less often since having started using a subscription service. These results are confirmed by another survey done in Denmark by Megafon for IFPI and AntiPiratGuppen (2009).

What service do people use?

Grooveshark is by far the most popular service.  But as this is a music service operating in the grey zone between legal and illegal, with the slogan: “Play any song in the world for free”, I would like to focus on Spotify and TDC Play in this short summary. This because Spotify is not available in Denmark, mostly because the service has yet to make an agreement with Koda. I therefore find it interesting to compare this service to one already established on the Danish market.

Even though Spotify is not available in Denmark, 25 out of 203 respondents use it, and 60% (15) of these are from Denmark. No matter nationality, they all (100%) have listed friends as an important source for new musical findings. This proves that there might be a more social aspect to music subscription services, compared to more traditional music consumption. Spotify users also have a far larger usage of playlists (48%). The discovery of new music on online media is also way higher compared to the already mentioned general picture. 48% of all 25 Spotify users hear of new artists and new releases on blogs, 56% from specialized music websites and 44% from online recommendation services.

Services such as TDC Play and YouSee are surprisingly slightly less popular than Spotify (especially considering the fact that TDC Play launched in April 2008). What is interesting here is that the users of TDC Play and YouSee seem to be more deadlocked in old media habits, while the users of Spotify are more online minded. Spotify users are also slightly more interested in music compared to the users of TDC Play and YouSee, and at the same time the users of Spotify value better sound quality.

It is, however, important to mention that the users of Spotify in Denmark today are innovators as the service has yet to launch. When they (finally) launch, it is natural to assume the total users of Spotify’s will become more like the general picture. It is however striking numbers for TDC Play that more or less the same amount of Danish respondents uses Spotify as TDC Play. Especially when we take into consideration that TDC Play launched more than one and a half year ago. This way it is conspicuously tempting to claim that TDC Play will be ousted by Spotify soon after launch in Denmark, although this of course only is based on speculations.

But one thing is for sure: If we look at this from a consumer perspective, there’s simply no reason to prevent Spotfiy from launching in Denmark. The fact that Spotify has yet to pay out large amount of royalties to artists is another matter, but hey: We all have to start somewhere, either we are artists or entrepreneurs.

Download the full report here