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Statistics: Online Music Apps

Written by Richard MacManus / August 29, 2008 2:16 PM / 7 Comments

To complement the poll we ran this week about streaming music sites, we sourced data from comScore about the Internet Radio industry. comScore's data shows that the big Internet companies still dominate, specifically AOL Radio and Yahoo Music. In contrast, our poll - the second annual time that we've run it - shows that last.fm and Pandora are the favorites of our readers.

Is this a case of geek trends being at odds with mainstream? Or is it that the mainstream hasn't yet caught onto the cool music sites? Let's check out and analyze the stats from both comScore and our poll....

Here are the full stats that comScore provided us, for the year July 07 - July 08:

  Unique Visitors (000)
  Jul-07 Jul-08 % Change
Total Internet : Total Audience 180,078 189,134 5
Radio 47,392 61,458 30
AOL Music 15,284 23,884 56
Yahoo! Music 23,075 18,725 -19
Clear Channel Online 10,697 9,394 -12
PANDORA.COM 2,551 4,834 89
Interactive One 512 3,515 587
CBS Radio 3,469 3,240 -7
NPR.ORG 1,717 2,538 48
Citadel Broadcasting Corporation 1,373 1,885 37
BATANGA.COM 1,239 1,810 46
Disney Music 1,721 1,598 -7
Cumulus Media Inc. N/A 1,058 N/A
Emmis Communications Corporation 1,269 1,044 -18
Entercom Communications Corporation 786 789 0
ONTHERADIO.NET 704 622 -12
LIVE365.COM 963 582 -40
MediaSpan Group Inc. 1,428 482 -66
RADIOTIME.COM 147 446 203
AMERICANPUBLICMEDIA.ORG 303 386 27
1CLUB.FM 205 384 88
Spanish Broadcasting System, Inc. 236 352 49

Note that last.fm isn't categorized as 'Internet Radio' by comScore and as far as we know, it isn't part of CBS Radio listed above. We asked CBS (which owns last.fm) to send us the comScore data they have on last.fm, and here it is for the same period:

Notable Trends

AOL Music, with 23.9 million unique visitors in July 08, is the strongest. It recorded a 56% increase over the past year, so its growth is very good. Yahoo Music is second with 18.7M uniques in July 08, however it has decreased 19% annually since July 07. Clear Channel Online, the largest operator of radio stations (amongst other things) in the US, is a clear third with 9.4M audience in July 08.

As for the online streaming sites that began as startups, despite its continuing legal woes and the fact it can't be heard throughout much of the rest of the world, Pandora's US growth has been very impressive: an 89% increase from last year, to 4.8M unique visitors in July. Its competitor last.fm had just over 3M unique visitors in July 08, and 62% annual growth.

We also checked Compete and their stats are fairly similar, in terms of the trends, to comScore's. Compete has Pandora at 81.8% annual growth, with last.fm at 72.6%:

So the overall trend here is that both Pandora and last.fm are showing strong growth. But AOL Music continues to set the pace. Yahoo Music must be worried about its decline.

ReadWriteWeb Poll: last.fm and Pandora Still Most Popular

Our poll asked: what are your favorite online music streaming services? We ran almost the same poll last year. The results have shown that there is more diversity this year in the number of online music services that our readers tune into. While Last.fm and Pandora once again came out a clear first and second (respectively), other apps made a strong showing. Last.fm got 19% and Pandora 15%. Last year last.fm was at 31% and Pandora 29%, although last year's poll wasn't multi-choice.

Of the smaller services, Highnote, lala.com, Seeqpod all polled at the 8-9% range this year. Non-radio services such as Imeem and iTunes Music Service drew around 4-5%, while small but trendy services Hype Machine and Muxtape both came in at 4%.

So last.fm and Pandora are still favorites among the early adopter and tech-savvy people that read our site. But it's great to see so much interest in the many new online music startups (some of whom we didn't manage to fit into our poll, it must be said). As a matter of interest, here are some Compete stats for a few of the well performing smaller sites in our poll:

Hype Machine is perhaps the one to watch here, with 177% growth annually and on an upward trend. It grew 10.2% last month alone.

Conclusion

So AOL and Yahoo still dominate music streaming in the US, but last.fm and Pandora are beloved by many of our readers, and are growing fast in comScore too. We asked our panelists in our podcast show this week (link below) which sites they think will be popular this time next year. We'd like to ask the same question here. Do you see any dark horses amongst the smaller services, that may even show up in next year's comScore charts?

See also: Future of Online Music - Industry Players Discuss. This presents highlights from our podcast show earlier this week, in which senior representatives from Yahoo Music, Imeem and Rhapsody discussed online music trends.


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  1. I use Last.fm religiously and it has completely changed the way that I listen to music online. I rarely stream radio stations now as I prefer to discover music through Last.fm and at least I don't have to listen to a radio presenter struggling to be interesting. I am disappointed that Pandora doesn't work here in the UK as I would like to try it out especially as a lot of my friends online speak highly of the service!

    Posted by: Joe Dawson Posted on FriendFeed   | August 29, 2008 3:13 PM



  2. When you look at the 5 sites on Quantcast, the results are actually quite different, and show more of an emerging trend. HypeMachine is actually outpacing Live365 internationally, here's the link:

    http://www.quantcast.com/profile/traffic-compare?domain0=listen.grooveshark.com&domain1=lala.com&domain2=live365.com&domain3=hypem.com&domain4=seeqpod.com

    Posted by: Andrew Wise | August 29, 2008 4:14 PM



  3. Imeem is killing it vs. Last.fm - it is a great service, has deals with all the labels, and is much bigger according to Complete.

    Playlist.com is also interesting because of its tremendous growth, although i am not sure what category it falls under.

    http://siteanalytics.compete.com/imeem.com+last.fm+playlist.com/?metric=uv

    Posted by: Frank Sinton Posted on FriendFeed   | August 29, 2008 4:18 PM



  4. check out TheSixtyOne.com

    Posted by: Zee at WeDoCreative Posted on FriendFeed   | August 29, 2008 4:25 PM



  5. deezer is a popular service

    rc

    trading tennis blog

    Posted by: rc | August 29, 2008 4:41 PM



  6. Pandora has been an amazing experience for me. It works very well on my iPhone even in Edge and I'm really quite hooked.

    Posted by: Andrew Leyden Posted on FriendFeed   | August 29, 2008 5:48 PM



  7. I've never really got into the streaming music thing, but I ran some of these sites through Syntryx, which I use for my work and I found something interesting. Live365 and Pandora are in the lead with the smaller services mentioned, with live365.com leading by about 2000 links into their site. However, 1-step away, I see pandora with over 500,000 more sites linking to those sites linking to it. This indicated a much larger reach than their close competitor.

    Posted by: Trammell | September 24, 2008 10:51 AM




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