Spotify now has more paid-for subscribers than any other music streaming service in the world – a fantastic achievement! But what about the catalog? Who’s most likely to have that forgotten B-side you suddenly have an inkling to hear? Whose archive is more likely to have that obscure indie band you always wanted to listen to again? Who has the most number of tracks to stream? Read on for a comparison of the music catalog sizes for the ten top music streaming services!
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Spotify is the winner here: Spotify has a larger catalog than any other music streaming service in the world! They always said that their goal was to be able to stream “all the world’s music” and it looks like they’re the most-likely service to achieve this. Note though that Gracenote lists over 97 million songs in their database, so Spotify and the rest have only just started…
NOTES
- We did not include music jukeboxes (Last.fm, Pandora, We7, Slacker Radio etc.) since these are not on-demand services: unlike the streaming apps listed above, you can’t decide which songs to listen to. Incidentally though, Pandora has only 800,000 tracks as at March 2011.
- We also did not include Grooveshark (suspect legality and no way to determine catalog size since users upload their own tracks), YouTube and of course iTunes as it offers purchase downloads only (here’s a post on Spotify vs. iCloud).
- Catalog sizes quoted here were determined from the service’s own websites, wikipedia, and news reports from reputable sources. Spotify track count obtained from their Metadata API (the first number returned is the global total number of tracks).
UPDATE
Kyle Bylin syndicated this article on hypebot. Check it out as there are some interesting comments!
Chart last updated July 17, 2011.