In our most recent blog! post, we talked about the music sales from 2021, where we saw that digital music makes up the largest revenue share. If you haven’t seen it yet, feel free to catch up here.

Within the last 20 years, an incredible number of music services have emerged, including big names such as Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer and so on. But which is the one that is most essential for your music career? This is clearly one of the questions we’ll be answering today.
But before we get to this question let’s look at the business models of streaming services and how revenue is generated. Users often can sign up for different subscription plans at their desired service. Usually there is also a free plan, which is financed through advertising. Users would have to listen to ads in between songs.

So which streaming store has the largest number of subscribers?
Spotify has more paying subscribers than any other music streaming service.
Statistics from 2021 show that Spotify has the highest subscription market share in the global streaming business with 31%. 
Apple Music has a 15% global music streaming subscriber market share, placing it second behind Spotify. 
Amazon Music is in third place with a 13% share of the global music streaming subscriber market.
The total number of subscribers of all streaming music services is over 523 million. Streaming music is therefore by far the most popular way of consuming music nowadays.

With Spotify being the key player in the streaming market we are proud to share that dig dis! is listed as Spotify Preferred Partner, which means that Spotify actively recommends our distribution service to artists and labels all over the world. 
So as an artist, it’s very worthwhile for you to focus on Spotify and build your audience there. Get access to your Spotify profile,start managing your account and pitch your music for playlist placements. Here we summed up all the important info you need to know about Spotify.
Did you also know that dig dis! is one of the few music distributors worldwide where you can enter your Spotify Artist URI directly into our system when uploading a new product. On release day the artist will then be linked to the correct profile. This will guarantee that your releases will never be assigned or mixed up with any other artist profile again.
Of course accessing and maintaining your artist profiles also applies to other key services such as Apple Music and Amazon Music.
Another outstanding success story is YouTube’s streaming service ‘YouTube Music’. In 12 months, it recorded a subscriber growth of over 50%, which makes it the fastest-growing music streaming service out there. YouTube also announced that it has passed the 50 million subscriber mark for YouTube Music and YouTube Premium (including trial members) worldwide. 
So it’s worth focusing here too. 

We hope that this little insight into the latest subscriber numbers of the leading music stream services was helpful. As you can see with the growing numbers of subscribers, it is more important than ever to keep your artist profiles up to date and try to build an audience on these services.