While music has the power to set our mood for everything, recent research has shown that music streaming services have been hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic. The research has been published in the INFORMS journal ‘Marketing Science’. The study found that the decline in people’s mobility during the pandemic significantly reduced the consumption of streaming audio music. Instead, people turned more to video platforms.
“On average, audio music consumption fell by more than 12% after the World Health Organization (WHO) pandemic statement on March 11, 2020. As a result, Spotify lost $838 million in revenue during the pandemic in the first three quarters of 2020,” said Jaeung. Sim of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) “Our results show that human mobility plays a much larger role in the audio consumption of music than previously thought.”
The study, “Virus Shook the Streaming Star: Estimating the Covid-19 Impact on Music Consumption,” conducted by Sim in addition to Daegon Cho, also of KAIST, Youngdeok Hwang of City University of New York and Rahul Telang of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) , looked at online music streaming data for top songs over two years in 60 countries, as well as Covid-19 case and lockdown statistics and daily mobility data, to determine the nature of the changes.
“Despite the general expectation that the pandemic would universally benefit online media platforms, we found that it negatively impacted music streaming services,” said Telang of Heinz College at CMU. “Our findings imply that the significantly changing media consumption environment puts music streaming in a fiercer competition against other forms of media that deliver more dynamic and vibrant experiences to consumers.”
The researchers found that music consumption via video platforms was positively associated with Covid-19 severity, lockdown policies and time at home.
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