We hope you like our new series, #A3Cpolls.
We will be asking one question each week in order to provide some insight into trends and opinions in the hip-hop community.
This week, we wanted to know what people are using to stream music.
Over the last couple years there has been a lot of shake up in the streaming world which has taken over music listening. Gone are the days of CDs or even file sharing. Owning music will likely be foreign to anyone born after 1999 and whether you like it or not, music streaming is here to stay. The questions of the future are; how will you discover music, how will playlists be created, shared and consumed and what relationship will the consumer have with the service?
2015 was a BIG YEAR, and things won't be slowing down in 2016. Apple Music entered the market in a major way. Rhapsody had a good year, and now has over 3M paid users. TIDAL stumbled out of the gate, but is putting out some awesome projects and carving out a niche in the market. Grooveshark is gone. Rdio was bought by Pandora, which continues to build upon its services and grow its user base... Yet, Spotify remains the major player in the field and the service to beat.
There is NO doubt we will see some major moves this year and over the next couple years. Some services may merge, or go under. iHeartMusic and Pandora seem to be going head to head, and there may be a merger there... I DON'T KNOW THE FUTURE, but it's something to keep an eye out for, yes?
Here is a good comparison between the services.
What we don't know in full is how hip-hop consumes music differently and maybe this poll gives us some insight. There will be more on music streaming coming from us this year and we will be talking about it in depth at 2016 A3C Festival & Conference.
