According to estimates from Insider Intelligence (formerly eMarketer), Amazon Music is on track to overtake Pandora this year to become the second-most-subscribed streaming music service in the United States. Notably, the study included users of both paid and ad-supported plans for these services.
So while Apple Music has an estimated 38.2 million subscribers, compared to Amazon Music’s 52.6 million or Pandora’s 49.1 million, none of Apple Music’s subscribers are on a free, ad-supported plan (though they can of course have a free trial).
Insider Intelligence forecasts that Amazon Music is expected to grow 5.3% year-over-year, while Pandora has been losing subscribers since 2017 — and the subscriber base of SiriusXM’s music streaming service is expected to decline 6.7% in 2022.
A Pandora representative declined to comment on the new report but said Pandora is the leading ad-supported streaming music service in the United States. According to its latest report, Pandora now has 52.3 million users, down from 58.9 million the year before.
When it comes to paying users, Pandora lags far behind its rivals, according to estimates from Insider Intelligence last year. Spotify remains the No. 1 streaming music service in the US, with 180 million premium subscribers worldwide and 406 million monthly active users on paid and free plans.
According to Spotify’s own report, it has about 93.38 million active users in North America, including 28.8 million paying subscribers. Since Spotify’s numbers don’t narrow down the number of users by country, it’s hard to directly compare Pandora’s audience size to Spotify’s, but Pandora’s market share continues to decline. Pandora’s gross profit was still $743 million last year, up 30% from 2020.
As Amazon Music has continued to grow, there have been some notable improvements to the product itself. Amazon Music and Apple Music both launched lossless audio streaming services for all users last year, a feature Spotify didn’t have yet, and it couldn’t explain its delays.
Amazon is also trying to beef up its podcast offering, adding simultaneous transcription for select podcasts. But Spotify’s podcast listening continues to grow rapidly, despite the platform’s controversial content decisions. With more acquisitions in the podcast industry, it’s clear that Spotify doesn’t want to loosen its grip on the streaming industry.