Demand and supply side effects of COVID-19 on music streaming

ABSTRACT

Restrictions imposed to fight the Covid-19 pandemic dramatically changed life. This affected the entertainment industry with consequences on the demand (consumer behavior in terms of quantity and preferences) and supply side (quantity of published products). Suffering from revenue losses because of canceled live events due to Covid-19, the music industry heavily relied on streaming revenues so we investigate how the lockdowns and other restrictions affected demand and supply within the music streaming industry. Using daily Spotify streaming data, as well as the MusicBrainz encyclopedia, we empirically investigate changes in the number of streams per day, listening preferences (demand side), and the number of releases (supply side) for the United States, Germany, Brazil, and Indonesia. For the demand side, the results imply that lockdown measures led to a decrease in the total number of streams per day. This coincided with country-specific changes in music preferences such as a short-term increase in the consumption of happy music. On the supply side, a global increase in songs released with increasing lockdown measures was found. Although most effects mitigate over time, they lead to serious ongoing financial consequences for artists, record labels, and streaming services.

Acknowledgments

We thank the participants of the research group on “Marketing of hedonic media products in the context of social media,” in particular the senior members Henrik Sattler, Franziska Völckner, Michel Clement, Thorsten Hennig-Thurau, Mark Heitmann, Christian Barrot, and Detlef Schoder for many helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

We use the Spotify API via an official developer account to gather the data. As the dataset belongs to Spotify, we cannot directly provide it.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/08997764.2024.2365725

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the German National Science Foundation (DFG Al 190/13-2).

Notes on contributors

Janek Meyn

Janek Meyn received his PhD from Kühne Logistics University, where he specialized in platform economics within the music industry.

Sönke Albers

Sönke Albers is a Professor of Marketing and Innovation at the Kühne Logistics University, Hamburg and the University of Kiel in Germany. His research interests include marketing-mix planning, sales management, entertainment products, and diffusion of innovations. He has published in journals such as Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, International Journal of Research in Marketing, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.