Last week, Spotify turned five years old and to celebrate, the company released a batch of impressive data. But buried within the fun facts is a tidbit that’s just as depressing as it is surprising: 20 per cent of Spotify tracks have never been streamed.
Of course, Spotify cast a positive light on the information: 80 per cent of the songs in the catalogue have actually been streamed at least once. Presented this way, it’s quite a shock that Spotify’s 24 million monthly users have meandered their way out to that much music. For example, you’d never think that somebody actually listens to obscurities like Squab Teen, but lo, they’ve got three followers on Spotify (this blogger included).
Music services love (LOVE!) to tout the size of their catalogues. Spotify, like Rdio, Xbox Music, and iTunes Radio all brag about their catalogues that all contain more than 20 million songs. But it’s easy to forget that a huge selection of songs that nobody wants to listen to doesn’t really mean anything. Consider that Pandora defends its relatively meagre one million song catalogue by saying it’s not that quantity of songs that matters but rather the quality of the selection and of the service that helps people discover the music.
Spotify’s 80 per cent metric suggests that, yes, users are making it out to the nether regions of Spotify’s catalogue and by proxy, that Spotify’s doing a decent job of getting them out there.
Still, those 4 million unstreamed jams must be lonely. Can you spare a stream for a starving song? [Spotify via Buzzfeed]