Audio streaming services are more popular than video streaming services, according to a recent study done worldwide, the results revealing that the world is slowly but surely starting to make the transition to this new method of listening to music, to the detriment of using YouTube, or other websites.
In the first 6 months of 2016, 114 billion audio streams were listened to worldwide compared to only 95 billion video streams, the difference between the two ways of consuming multimedia content being large, and in the following months it is expected to grow.
Practically people preferred to use services such as Apple Music, Spotify or Google Music to listen to music, instead of watching YouTube videos that contain that music, and this trend will continue in the coming years since these streaming services are partially or totally available for free.
The increase in popularity of these audio streaming services is mainly due to the fact that very well-known artists have offered their songs or albums on audio streaming platforms, Rihanna's song Work being the most listened to in 2016, while his new album Drake recorded 1.5 billion streams in 2 months.
At the moment, Spotify is the largest audio streaming service, with over 30 million subscribers worldwide and approximately 100 million users of the service, including the free version, but the company lost 170 million euros last year, it being always in loss, without generating profit.
Apple Music, on the other hand, has 15 million active users and it is not known when they use the 3-month trial version, but to the same extent it is not known how much money Apple earns or loses with this audio streaming service, but those of Cupertino, unlike Spotify, can afford to cover losses of 170 million euros annually.
