Music streaming saw a 22.6% growth in 2022, making it clear for once and all that we live in a streaming world. A new stat only reinforces that reality. For the first time, on-demand audio streams crossed the one trillion mark on March 23rd, 2023. According to a report from research firm, Luminate, “global music listeners have spent roughly 960,000 years streaming music in 2023, so far.”
I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations. Using UCLA research, I assumed that each streamed song is 3 minutes long. About 10 minutes of music (in median quality) streamed on Spotify is about 12 megabytes. That translates to about 3.6 megabytes per song. A trillion songs should add up to a whopping 3.6 exabytes — that’s a lot of streaming! I am presuming that each stream is equal to one song so I might be either under or overestimating the data usage by music. I also use Spotify as a proxy for streaming music because it is still the most prominent platform.
The Internet of 2023 is nothing like the Internet of 1993 — it has primarily become an on-demand replacement for the old media world: news, music, games, and videos are all the killer apps of bandwidth. No wonder we all are now part of the new Gigabit Generation.
April 11, 2023. San Francisco