Millennials are discovering and enjoying music differently than the generations before them: Younger listeners spend on average 25 hours a week streaming music from a variety of online services, according to Vevo’s new “Music Fan Report,” which the music video platform is going to widely release early next week.
But it’s not only the medium that has changed. Usage of services like Pandora and Spotify as well as Vevo itself is also beginning to influence what millennials are listening to, and how they define themselves as fans.
One casualty of that process seem to be genres: More than a third of all music fans surveyed by Vevo said that they aren’t fans of any particular musical genre, and just one in four is a fan of one single genre. More than 60 percent of listeners on the other hand said that they were “always trying to find new music.” Add algorithms and personalized playlists of today’s music services, and you’ll end up with listening habits that defy genres.
So where do millennials go for their music fix? Vevo is leading the charge here, with 87 percent of all music fans saying that they frequented the platform in the last month, to the tune of 13.3 hours per week on average. Pandora is unsurprisingly second, attracting 62 percent of all listeners, with each of them tuning in for 8.1 hours per week on average, followed by Spotify and Soundcloud.
Interestingly, Vevo’s survey has Google Play ahead of both iTunes Radio and Amazon Music as well as iHeartradio with regards to audience share, and attracting even more weekly listening time than Soundcloud.
However, one should note that the survey was conducted during the first quarter of this year, with Vevo quizzing 2000 online participants. Apple released Apple Music in June, so it obviously wasn’t included.
Also not mentioned is Google’s YouTube, which is widely being seen as the biggest online music service. However, there’s a good reason for this omission: Vevo is distributing its music on YouTube, and is in fact the biggest source for major label content on the platform.
Vevo doesn’t break out how many views it gets on each of its distribution platforms, but a spokesperson said that it attracts more than 12 billion video views worldwide per month.