Spotify’s New Fan Study Is Fascinating

You have to hand it to Spotify - the company does not just sit on its data. It’s always looking for new insights, which is to be expected from any company these days. Instead of keeping it all to itself though, it presents at least some of it back to its artists, who are the real soul and driver of the platform. Its new Fan Study brings up a number of surprising points that seem somewhat counterintuitive for the world we live in today, but are certainly worth checking out.

The CD Is Still Alive

Case in point, the cities where the most CDs are sold. The top 5 are Phoenix, Los Angeles, London, Austin and Chicago. Phoenix doesn’t surprise me, since there are a lot of retirees there that still think the CD is the only way to consume music, but Los Angeles, London and Austin are music towns with lots of young and hip artists. One would think they’d shun the round plastic disc.

But that brings up another question. Do these cities have the most CD sales because they have the most stores that sell them? If so, does that mean that more CDs would be sold if there were more local outlets to buy them? Regardless of the answer, it’s not going to slow the CD’s slide into obscurity, but it is a curiosity.

Vinly By Genre

The types of ancillary music merchandise that each music genre fan buys is equally fascinating. For instance, more hats are sold to country music fans than any other genre, while rock fans overwhelmingly love t-shirts as their favorite music accessory.

But while the merch was divided up into shirts, outerwear, CDs, hats and general accessories in the study, it’s the vinyl sales that were most surprising. For instance, vinyl was the #1 merch purchase in every listed music genre except for rock and metal. Even there it was #2 on the list.

Vinyl sales are even more surprising when you look at the artists that are doing the most selling in comparison to their other merch. Of course there are always the legacy rock artists that have fans that will buy any new re-release on the format, but the real news is that it’s not those artists that are having the most success.

In fact, it’s the newest artists that are now selling that other larger round piece of plastic. Artists who’s first release came in 2020 found that vinyl made up almost 60% of their merch sales, while artists who’s first release came before 1980 found that it composed only around 24% of their sales. On the other hand, those numbers were flipped with it came to shirt sales, which makes sense when you think about it.

There was also an interesting chart presented that showed that just because an artist had a lot of streams, that didn’t necessarily correlate to merch sales. In fact, some artists with low stream rates actually sold a lot more merch in some cases. Obviously this is totally based on the quality of the artwork (some artists are better at artwork than music) and marketing (some are better at that as well).

Some Cities More Open To New Music Than Others

Another aspect of the study was that many artists are breaking out of unexpected parts of the world, primarily because there are cities that are just more into music discovery than others. For instance, Sao Paulo, Santiago, Mexico City, Los Angeles, and London were the top 5 cities for streaming new content.

Again, you’d expect LA and London as they’re big music towns, but Sao Paulo? Some other surprises on the list include Frankfurt, Istanbul, Jakarta and Buenos Aires. Who knew?

Listeners Are More Adventurous

While back in the 1970s it seemed that everyone was open to hearing almost any musical genre, those tastes became more siloed by the time we hit the 80s and beyond. It looks like we might be returning to the openness of those hippie days though, according to the study.

Fans now easily cross from genre to genre without thinking about it much. While it’s true that there’s a lot of similarity between certain genres like pop, electronic and hip hop, 80% of listeners of classical music will also listen to pop and 73% to rock. Regardless of the main genre, the listener crossover to others that aren’t necessarily similar is encouraging. This could only be good for music in general as listeners become more open minded about what they’re hearing.

There’s a lot more in this Fan Study that is definitely interesting from a music industry perspective, but the main thing is that as soon as you begin to believe you know what a music audience is thinking, it will change on you. I can only see that as very healthy indeed.