Remember when Pandora was the hot new steaming app?
How the mighty fall. Once, the uncontested 800-lbs gorilla of audio streaming platforms, Pandora is falling far behind the new hotness, Spotify.
As if that wasn’t enough to deal with, Pandora also has Amazon Music to contend with.
According to eMarketer, Amazon Music will increase its monthly listenership by 18.5% this year to 45.8 million, which represents 21.3% of digital audio listeners, according to their latest estimates.
That’s an increase of 2.5 million Amazon Music listeners from its previous forecast.
eMarketer expects that as it continues to invest in and grow its audio strategy, Amazon Music will surpass Pandora in monthly listeners by 2023.
But the audio streaming wars are not only about music. As I discussed last year, audio presents a massive new opportunity for content marketers.
Spotify has been investing heavily in podcasts to add to it’s already comprehensive music library.
While Pandora’s music library is comparable, it has been late to the podcasting game.
Amazon’s music library is nothing to brag about, in my opinion. It does have Audible at its disposal so there’s a cache of spoken-word content to draw from and the company has been dipping its toe in the podcast pool, so potential exists.
The problem right now is that Spotify’s killer ingredient is it’s algorithm, as I discussed in Episode 207 of the Beyond Social Media Show.
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