The New Music Battle: YouTube Versus Spotify

Analysis reveals that songs peak first on YouTube, before any other music-related platform

@BRANDONVHIXON

Oct 30, 2022

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The New Music Battle: YouTube Versus Spotify

Our analysis of the meteoric rise of Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) revealed that the song first peaked on YouTube, before any other music-related platform. Considering the dominance Spotify seems to have over the industry, this fact surprised us a little.

We decided to do a little research to find out if this applied to other popular songs of 2022. Utilizing Google Trends, we selected five different songs from the Billboard 100 charts and compared the search interest between them on Spotify vs YouTube. The results proved that all of them tend to peak faster and higher on the video sharing platform, and for 3 out of the five songs, remains where the largest search volume is still coming from today.

*This data does not look at the search volume within the apps itself, nor at discoverability.

While Spotify has undoubtedly had a major impact on the way we consume music, YouTube is still the first and most popular place for music to trend. It remains the go-to platform for people searching for new songs, a title that Spotify might find difficult to steal. Using qualitative research, we hypothesized some of the possible reasons for this:

YouTube’s free — Some people are simply still against the idea of paying for music. While Spotify’s subscription fee of $9.99 for an individual plan is fairly reasonable, some people are simply against the idea of having to pay for music when it’s completely free on YouTube.

YouTube’s own video streaming service, YouTube Music, also still hasn’t quite reached the level of success as its competitor. ‘Download Spotify’ garners more searches than ‘download youtube music’, while ‘youtube to mp3’ far surpasses searches for ‘download Spotify’, thus proving that the issue comes down to having to pay rather than the platform itself.

Advent || FE5 Forseti's Cut @DarkAdvent01

Am I the only one who keeps using YouTube to MP3 Converters to store music on my phone? I swear I'm way too lazy to figure out Spotify, and not really willing to pay for it.

🌻beehaw🐝 @cosplaying_bee

y'all posting your spotify songs and im over here alone with my youtube playlists i refuse to pay for spotify

An interesting observation we made while analyzing the search interest for ‘youtube to mp3’ is that no North or South American countries appear in the top 15 countries searching for this keyword. Instead, it’s predominantly made up of Asian, European, and Middle Eastern countries.