Roughly a month ago, the Swedish born music streaming site arrived in the U.S. Since then, Spotify has become one of the most popular streaming services in the country. According to ZDNet’s Rachel King, Spotify is now worth $1.1 billion since it crossed the pond. They have amassed a market of 1.5 million daily users, approximately 175,000 are paid subscribers. Their immediate and growing impact on the internet grabbed the attention of our data analytics team. We wanted to see what impact they made on our servers.
Chitika Insights analyzed a series of data looking at search volume for queries relevant to Spotify over two weeks dating back to its release. Immediately following its release on the 14th of July, Spotify made a splash on our servers where there was a 1,000% spike for searches relevant to Spotify. After the abrupt increase in searches, interest declined over the following three days. Then, on July 18th, query searches jumped 250%! This second spike was probably caused by the publicity Spotify received after introducing their new Android app that day.
After July 18th, Spotify queries steadily dropped over the next week. This rapid rise and decline of Spotify was eerily similar to Insights’ study on Google+ when it first came out. The initial data pull showed that G+ queries skyrocketed, while searches for Facebook and Twitter fluctuated day to day. Based on the results, Google+ looked like it would contend with Facebook sooner than expected. However, since that study, there’s been a huge drop off in the total traffic for Google+.
This seems to be the nature of internet trends. When a site or program is new, and has a lot of publicity surrounding it, people flock to it in huge numbers. Sometimes this trend lasts a couple days, or a couple weeks, but people quickly lose interest very quickly and jump to the next hot topic.
That being said, Spotify will not fall off the face of the internet. They’re a proven success internationally, and have a growing user base. They’re already ranked among the likes of Pandora and Last.fm. The gradual drop off in Spotify queries don’t indicate a lack of popularity, but instead illustrate how quickly hot internet trends cool off.
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