Research Intelligence
Spotify’s Wild Week
When Neil Young pulled his music catalog in protest, he set off a series of events that few could have anticipated. Since then, Spotify has been caught in a maelstrom of public outcry, trending hashtags (#deletespotify), musician exits, and account cancellations.
It can be hard to tease apart the impact this is having on Spotify’s business, but with tools from Similarweb Digital Suite, we can take a deeper look into just how wild of a week Spotify had from January 24 to January 30.
To start, a review of top trending search terms driving traffic to spotify.com yields something interesting. Neil Young’s name isn’t trending, but “delete spotify account” is up 188.6% week over week (WoW).
Digging deeper into Spotify’s account flows, we see that the number of visits to a page to downgrade from premium to free jumped 196% WoW. This represents over 118,000 premium subscribers who paid at least $9.99/month.
Visits to that page peaked on January 28, and while the majority of that traffic came from internal referral navigation, there was a sizeable number of visits from people directly typing the URL into their browser.
During that same week, more than 18,000 Spotify users took the additional step of deleting their Spotify accounts — a 781% WoW increase.
The story that’s emerging here is that a subset of Spotify’s current install base is following Neil Young’s lead and exiting the platform. However, it doesn’t look like this story is turning off new users to Spotify. In fact, desktop visits to Spotify’s new account sign-up page barely budged.
And for the majority of Spotify’s install base that hasn’t exited, desktop visits to The Joe Rogan Experience — the podcast that initially drove Neil Young’s exit from Spotify — actually grew 56%. For Rogan, the old media adage that “any publicity is good publicity” seems to be ringing true and could indicate just how popular he is with podcast listeners.
In fact, The Joe Rogan Experience remains Spotify’s top podcast.
With Similarweb’s digital suite for publishers and media, we were able to reach beyond the headlines and hashtags to reveal the true story of what’s going on with Spotify.
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