Almost all Norwegians now stream music, and with 18 hours of music listening on a streaming service a week, we spend significantly more time than those in our neighboring countries. YouTube is the biggest, but we spend more time on Spotify.
/ 22/01/2019 / Kristian DugstadAlmost all Norwegians now stream music, and with 18 hours of music listening on a streaming service a week, we spend significantly more time than those in our neighboring countries. YouTube is the biggest, but we spend more time on Spotify.
Photo above: Kristian Dugstad
9 out of 10 Norwegians use streaming services to listen to music, and we are also the most avid listeners in the Nordics. The average time a Norwegian streamer spends listening to music on streaming services is a whopping 18 hours a week, in other words several hours a day. In comparison, the average time in our closest neighbor, Sweden, is 15,4 hours a week, while it is 11,1 hours a week in Denmark and 10,5 hours a week in Finland.
All this according to The Polaris Nordic Digital Music Survey 2018, a Nordic survey on digital music usage conducted by YouGov for the three Nordic rights organizations TONO (N), Koda (DK), Teosto (FIN).
You can read the entire survey here.
The survey also shows that those with a paid streaming service listen the most, almost 7 hours more per week than those who stream for free: 18,38 hours versus 11,44 hours. The same trend is also seen in the other Nordic countries. The difference varies between 5,5-7 hours in all countries.
– It is reasonable to believe that those who love music the most are also those with the greatest willingness to pay, and vice versa: That the paid subscriptions provide the best user experience, and that this in itself stimulates more music listening, says Willy Martinsen, Head of Communications at TONO.
An interesting feature of the survey is that those who pay for music streaming also tend to have subscriptions to movie streaming services. The fact that the paying streaming user is typically also a person in their 20s bodes well for the future in terms of willingness to pay for music and movie content.
Most people stream music on multiple services. YouTube is probably the service that reigns supreme (69 percent of Norwegians use YouTube to listen to music), but the amount of listening is still greater on Spotify, which is the streaming service with the most avid listeners, according to the survey. Norwegians listen to music on average 5 hours a week. Those with a paid Spotify subscription, on the other hand, stream on average 12,3 hours a week. This puts us close to the Swedes who have paid Spotify subscriptions, while the Danes stream 9,2 hours a week and the Finns 7,9 hours. Those who use the free version of Spotify stream on average 7,4 hours a week.
As TONO mentioned on its website in December, Norway is the Nordic country that listens to country music the most, far more than the Swedes, Finns and Danes. However, that does not mean that it is country that we listen to the most. At the top is pop music, which is stated by 50 percent of Norwegians as a favorite genre, followed by rock and then 80s music.
– It's probably not that surprising that it's pop that we listen to the most overall. The word can be defined broadly, that's one thing. The other is that even though most of us switch between genres, pop music is a kind of common reference point, and something most people listen to from time to time, says Martinsen.
Music streaming is increasing, and in parallel, consumption of other music media continues to decline. In 2015, 24 percent of Norwegians stated that they bought downloads (typically iTunes). This figure has dropped to 21 percent, according to the survey. And CD sales? In 2015, 19 percent responded that they had recently bought a CD, and this has now fallen to 15 percent. Vinyl is also declining from 8 percent in 2015 and 2017 (when the same survey was also conducted) to 7 percent now.
Digital Music Services in the Nordics 2018 was commissioned by TONO and its sister societies KODA and Teosto. Interviews were conducted with over 1000 people aged 15-65, as well as parents of children aged 12-14, in each of the four Nordic countries represented (Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland). In total, over 4000 interviews were conducted online in September 2018.