SCORE ONE FOR APPLE MUSIC, ONE FOR SPOTIFY

Apple Music has far fewer total users than Spotify, but Apple’s premium service boasted more active users than the dominant streamery, according to Verto Analytics’ Index of streaming-music usage for the month of February, 49.5m to 47.7m. Pandora is #3 in Verto’s Top 10 with 36.8m monthly users, and iHeartRadio is the top-ranking radio service, but its 19.9m active monthly users are less than half of those for Apple Music or Spotify. SiriusXM was next at #9.

By contrast, in what Verto describes as “stickiness”—a measure of user engagement in terms of daily users compared to monthly users—Spotify came out on top with 28% to Apple Music’s 19%. Spotify users racked up an average of 61 sessions per month to top the chart. Pandora was #2 with 43 sessions per month, while Apple Music users averaged only 12 sessions per month. That’s fewer than upstart TuneIn Radio, a platform for internet radio stations whose programming ranges from live sports to music and news stations, as well as podcasts.

In terms of demographics, the study shows that Spotify is generally popular among men (who make up 56% of its listeners) and is especially popular among younger listeners, who make up 26% of its overall user base, but over-index by a whopping 126% for this demographic—meaning that 18-24-year-olds are 2.26 times more likely to use Spotify compared to the general population in this demographic. Apple Music is generally more popular among women, who comprise 56% of its user base. Pandora, meanwhile, skews towards a slightly older audience: listeners between the ages of 25-34 make up the majority (28%) of its user base and are also overrepresented by 52%. Pandora also slightly over-indexes among listeners between the ages of 45-54, the only service of the three to do so.