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Amazon Music Hits 32 Million Subscribers Possibly Crushing Jay-Z's Tidal

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© 2017 Bloomberg Finance LP

Amazon Music’s 70% subscriber growth from last year has put all of its competitors on notice, especially Jay-Z’s high fidelity streaming serviceTidal. The Financial Times reported the company now has 32 million paid subscribers in an industry Goldman Sachs forecasts will reach $80 billion by 2030. Can Tidal along with Apple and Spotify devise a plan to fend off territory poaching Amazon from fully taking over the sector? 

The Breakdown You Need to Know

Many people wouldn’t immediately put Tidal in the same conversation as Amazon Music, though that would be a mistake.  CultureBanx noted the artist owned platform has a commanding presence with the most preeminent hi-def music streaming offering under its Hi-FI subscription. Amazon wants to slide in and of course take over this space with the launch of its own high fidelity music streaming platform tier, in addition to dethroning Apple Music and Spotify.

One bright spot could be Tidal’s music catalog that currently has 56 million songs, compared to just 50 million songs for Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers. Tidal hasn’t recently released its paid subscriber number, but as of 2016 the company touted three million users. This number has been highly disputed and estimated to be closer to one million.

With Amazon entering the picture things are likely to become even more challenging because in addition to offering exactly what Tidal has they can further incentivize subscribers with a prime membership. Specifically, Amazon Music attributes the growth of its music services to the increase in Amazon Prime members along with the popularity of its voice-activated Echo devices.

Tuning Up Subscribers: Now for the main players in the space, Spotify’s premium worldwide paid subscriber base grew 32% year-over-year, while Apple Music increased its paid subscriber base by 50% in the same time frame. While the yearly growth percentages of Amazon Music’s competitors are lower, the actual number of subscribers is significantly higher, with Spotify and Apple globally at 100 million and 60 million respectively

Last year, Amazon which doesn’t separate out its Prime Music subscribers, since its automatically bundled with all Prime memberships, reportedly had 20 million paid music subscribers across both Unlimited and Prime. An Amazon representative told Billboard that the current 32 million number cited by FT is "speculative."

About 14% of subscribers to Amazon Music are aged 55 or older, compared with just 5% of Spotify’s customers, according to Midia Research data cited by FT.  This audience makes perfect sense to go after as Amazon’s Echo devices are well-suited to make life easier for older adults, and is a great differentiation from the other platforms geared towards Millennials and Generation Z.