--- title: "On demand music streaming services: Which one will be around in five years?" description: Which music streaming services will survive the next five years? This article explores personalisation, business models and what drives listener loyalty. image: https://weareaffective.com/hubfs/learning-centre-images/on-demand-music-streaming-services-which-one-will-be-around-in-five-years.webp --- [Skip to content](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/on-demand-music-streaming-services-which-one-will-be-around-in-five-years#main-content) [![we\_are\_affective\_logo\_200](https://weareaffective.com/hs-fs/hubfs/we_are_affective_logo_200.png?width=175&height=48&name=we_are_affective_logo_200.png "we_are_affective_logo_200")](https://weareaffective.com) - [Home](https://weareaffective.com) - About Us - [Our Story](https://weareaffective.com/about) - [How We Work](https://weareaffective.com/how-we-work) - Our Services - [App Planning & Strategy](https://weareaffective.com/app-planning-strategy) - [App Design](https://weareaffective.com/app-design-agency) - [App UX Design](https://weareaffective.com/app-ux-design) - [App UI Design](https://weareaffective.com/app-ui-design) - [App Technical Architecture](https://weareaffective.com/app-architecture) - [Existing App Audits](https://weareaffective.com/app-audit) - [Case Studies](https://weareaffective.com/case-studies) - [Pricing](https://weareaffective.com/pricing) - [Learning Centre](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre) - [Get Started](https://weareaffective.com/get-started) Expert Guide Series # On demand music streaming services: Which one will be around in five years? Table of Contents Spotify has [ACM, 2025](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3800645.3812960) figures suggesting over 700 million people now use music streaming apps globally, and yet the market feels less settled than those numbers imply. New platforms keep appearing, older ones quietly reduce their ambitions, and a handful of services that looked permanent five years ago have already folded or been absorbed. The question of which services will still be operating in 2030 is not simply about who has the most money behind them. > The platforms most likely to survive the next five years are the ones built around emotional understanding, not catalogue size. Survival in streaming is increasingly about [architecture decisions made years before launch](https://weareaffective.com/app-planning-strategy), about how well a platform understands the emotional context of music listening, and about whether the business model can survive the royalty and licensing pressures that have quietly crushed several well-funded competitors. A service can have tens of millions of tracks and still be gone within three years. We work at the intersection of behavioural psychology and product design, so we see this pattern often. The platforms people keep are the ones that feel right, not just the ones that work. Understanding why requires looking at the full picture, from technical architecture to the psychology of what makes a listener feel genuinely served. ## The Current Streaming Landscape: Who Is Still Standing and Why Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tidal, Deezer, and YouTube Music make up the bulk of the global market, with a scattering of regional players filling gaps in markets where the majors have not invested seriously. Each of the main six has survived for different reasons, and those reasons matter when thinking about which ones will still be standing in 2030. Spotify survived by building the best discovery engine in the category and by investing in podcasts and creator tools before anyone else treated them as strategically important. Apple Music survived because it is bundled with a device that hundreds of millions of people already own. Amazon Music survived for almost the same reason. YouTube Music survived because the catalogue is effectively infinite and the free tier is genuinely usable. #### Tidal and Deezer: The Differentiated Middle Tidal has survived by positioning around high-fidelity audio and artist ownership, which attracts a specific listener willing to pay a premium. Deezer has survived by being genuinely developer-friendly, a quality that is underappreciated publicly but commercially very significant. We encountered this directly on a memory-sharing app project where we needed to integrate short audio clips into the product. Deezer had a robust API that supported clips, did not require users to hold a Deezer account, and gave access to a catalogue that matched or exceeded Spotify's in size. The technical route was also simpler because we were using the API in the way Deezer intended, which meant full compliance without workarounds. That kind of openness keeps a platform relevant even when its subscriber numbers are modest, because it creates a network of products built on top of it. ## Catalogue Size: Why Bigger Is No Longer a Differentiator The catalogue arms race is effectively over. Every major platform now offers access to roughly the same pool of licensed tracks, and the marginal value of adding more songs to a library that already holds 100 million tracks is close to zero for the average listener. A person who streams three hours of music a day will never hear more than a fraction of what is available to them, regardless of which platform they use. This matters strategically because catalogue size was the primary pitch for most platforms through the 2010s. "We have more music than anyone else" was a genuine differentiator when that was true. It is no longer true of any single platform, and repeating the pitch now tells listeners very little about why they should choose one service over another. #### When Catalogue Depth Does Still Matter There are narrow contexts where depth remains meaningful. Classical music listeners, jazz collectors, and fans of regional music from smaller markets genuinely care whether a platform carries the specific recordings they want, not just popular versions of the repertoire. For those listeners, catalogue is still a real buying criterion. But those audiences are also small enough that building a mainstream business strategy around them requires a very different model, which we will come to in the chapter on niche platforms. For the rest of the market, the catalogue question has resolved itself, and platforms that still lead with it in their marketing are effectively telling listeners nothing useful. The differentiation now lives elsewhere. ## Design that understands *your* users We build app experiences around real user behaviour, not assumptions. Research, psychology-driven design and technical specs that turn users into loyal advocates. [See how we work](https://weareaffective.com/how-we-work) [Get started](https://weareaffective.com/get-started) No commitment ## The Personalisation Arms Race: Algorithms, Taste Graphs, and Discovery If catalogue is no longer the differentiator, the next obvious candidate is personalisation. Spotify's Discover Weekly launched in 2015 and changed listener expectations permanently. Before it, curation was editorial: a human being picked the songs. After it, listeners expected a machine to understand them well enough to surface music they did not know they wanted. Every other platform has been chasing that capability ever since. The quality of a platform's taste graph, which is the underlying model of how it maps listening behaviour to preferences, has become one of the few remaining technical moats. A good taste graph improves with every listen. A poor one plateaus early and starts recommending the same forty songs indefinitely, which is one of the most common reasons listeners churn from a platform without being able to articulate why. They just feel like the service stopped knowing them. > A poor taste graph plateaus early and starts recommending the same songs, which is how platforms lose listeners quietly. We track this kind of [silent churn carefully in our own work](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/how-to-read-a-user-session-recording-for-emotional-signal-rather-than-task-compl). The pattern is consistent: users do not cancel dramatically. They just open the app less often, skip more tracks, and eventually stop launching it altogether. By the time a platform notices the drop in engagement, the emotional relationship has already ended. The three signals worth watching are how quickly a user's session length shortens, whether their skip rate increases, and whether they stop engaging with recommended content entirely. Those three together tell you the taste graph has failed that person before they know it themselves. If your platform's recommendation engine surfaces the same tracks within a fortnight of a listener starting a new playlist, treat that as a failure signal, not a sign the model is converging. ## What Developer Ecosystems and API Access Reveal About a Platform's Future The willingness of a streaming platform to open a proper API is a more reliable signal of long-term health than subscriber counts. A platform with a mature, developer-friendly API is inviting other builders to create products on top of it, and those products create dependency. When developers build on your infrastructure, they become invested in your survival. That is a compounding advantage. Spotify's API has been progressively restricted over the years, which has frustrated developers and, in some cases, pushed them towards alternatives. This is the context in which Deezer's openness becomes commercially meaningful rather than just technically notable. On the memory-sharing project mentioned earlier, the switch from Spotify to Deezer was not primarily motivated by Deezer's catalogue or its brand. It was motivated by the fact that Deezer had an API that actually allowed what we were trying to build, while working with Spotify without a proper API would have required significant workarounds and custom technical solutions to stay compliant with Spotify's own rules. The business model implication was also interesting. Because Deezer's API supported an upsell path, we were able to build a secondary revenue stream into the product through affiliate referrals, so when users wanted to hear a full track rather than a clip, there was a natural path to a Deezer subscription that generated referral income alongside the core product. That kind of architecture is only possible when the platform actively supports it. When evaluating which streaming platform to build on, check the API documentation before the marketing materials. The willingness to let developers build cleanly on top of a platform is a strong proxy for its technical maturity and long-term stability. ## Feature Parity Is Not Enough: Why Matching Competitors Does Not Guarantee Survival There is a recurring pattern in how new streaming services approach their launch strategy. A founder maps out every feature the market leader offers, builds the same set, and launches with the expectation that matching the incumbent is sufficient to compete. It is not, and the reason is not about features at all. We saw this directly when a pre-launch founder in the football industry came to us with a colour-coded spreadsheet mapping out competitor products. The goal was to merge multiple existing apps into one. He was visibly excited about the comprehensiveness of his analysis. When we began asking questions about prospective users, specifically why someone would choose an all-in-one product over the specialised tools they already used, and whether consolidation would reduce the quality of individual features, the energy in the room shifted. Those are uncomfortable questions to ask a founder who has spent months on a competitive matrix, but they are the right ones. The same logic applies to streaming. A platform that matches Spotify's features but gives a listener no emotional reason to switch will not switch them. As Simon's research position holds, having the same or even superior features to competitors does not guarantee adoption. What matters is [understanding users' emotions, their specific use cases](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/why-do-some-apps-feel-like-they-were-made-just-for-you), and the context in which they actually listen. - Offline listening matters differently to a commuter than to a gym user - Discovery matters differently to someone exploring a new genre than to someone who knows exactly what they want - Social features matter differently across age groups and listening contexts - Audio quality matters differently to a listener using earbuds than to one with a dedicated DAC and headphone amplifier [A feature that works for one listener](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/5-things-that-make-the-difference-between-so-so-apps-and-stellar-apps-what-your-) in one context cannot simply be transplanted and expected to work for a different person in a different context. Platforms that understand this build for specific listeners rather than for the average of all listeners, and that specificity is what earns loyalty. ## The Emotional Layer: How Feeling Understood Drives Retention Music is more emotionally loaded than most digital products. People use it to manage their mood, mark transitions, process difficult feelings, and connect memory to the present moment. A streaming service that treats listening as a purely transactional act, you want a song, here is the song, will always lose to one that understands the emotional context of that request. This is where the experience layer around the catalogue becomes the real product. How does the platform present a recommendation? Does it acknowledge that a listener is in a particular kind of mood, or does it just serve a track? Does the interface feel calm and considered when a listener is winding down, or does it push urgency and novelty regardless of context? These are design decisions with emotional consequences, and getting them wrong costs retention. #### Retention Signals That Matter The most reliable retention signals in music platforms are not the ones analysts tend to monitor. Dwell time within a playlist is more telling than whether a user opens the app. How quickly a user skips through recommendations tells you whether the emotional context of the suggestion matched their state. Re-engagement after a period of low activity, particularly whether a user returns to a specific playlist or mood category, tells you whether the platform has built an emotional anchor point for that person. Platforms that track and respond to these signals create a feedback loop that makes the service feel increasingly personal over time. That [feeling of being known is what makes switching](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/why-product-owners-should-write-the-users-second-session-before-the-first-one) to a competitor feel like starting over, and that friction is the most durable form of retention a streaming service can build. ## The Hidden Cost of Getting the Audience Wrong at Launch Launching to the wrong audience does not just slow growth. It can [permanently distort the product's trajectory](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/why-most-business-apps-fail-and-how-your-digital-business-can-avoid-the-same-fat) by creating a user base whose needs do not match what the platform was built for, attracting reviews and word of mouth from people who were never the target listener, and forcing the product to serve two contradictory audiences at once. On the social football platform we worked on, launching iOS-only had a significant impact on day-one adoption because the target audience was younger and disproportionately skewed towards Android users. We effectively built the more polished version of the product for the smaller portion of the relevant market. Post-launch, the client had to introduce advertising and abandon their planned subscription model because they lacked the user base to make subscriptions viable. That change in business model created ongoing financial strain on the product. #### App Store Listings and Expectation Management The app store listing is the first place expectation-setting happens, and it is frequently underinvested in. If a listing accurately describes what the platform does and who it is for, the people who download it have already self-selected as the right audience. They open the app with correct expectations, which reduces the early abandonment that comes from discovering the product is not what was advertised. The inverse is also true: a listing that over-promises or targets too broadly attracts downloads from listeners who will churn within the first session, pulling retention metrics down and distorting the data used to make the next round of product decisions. Write your app store listing for the listener who would love your platform, rather than for the broadest possible audience. A tighter listing attracts fewer downloads but significantly better retention. ## Niche Platforms and the Case for Depth Over Breadth Not every streaming service needs to compete with Spotify for general listeners. Some of the most financially stable music platforms are ones that serve a narrow audience with unusual depth, and they survive precisely because the majors cannot justify the investment required to serve those listeners at the same level. Bandcamp, before its acquisition complications, built a durable position by serving independent artists and the listeners who want a direct relationship with them. Qobuz built a position in high-fidelity audio for listeners who care about bit depth and sample rates in a way that Spotify's standard tier cannot serve. SoundCloud built a position for artists at the production stage, not the release stage. Each of these platforms carved a space the majors left open. The risk for niche platforms is pricing. Founders who have invested heavily in building a catalogue or a community frequently anchor their pricing to production costs rather than to what the target listener will actually pay. On a music app project we worked on, the client came from the music production world and knew exactly what the recordings had cost to make. They wanted to recoup that investment within weeks, which is not how consumer app economics work. That anchor prevented them from considering a lower price point or a longer-term volume strategy, and it is the kind of thinking that can make a viable niche product economically unworkable before it has had a chance to build a user base. ## Business Model Sustainability: Subscriptions, Licensing, and the Affiliate Middle Ground The economics of music streaming are structurally difficult. Licensing costs are substantial across the industry, and the margin available to a platform after paying rights holders leaves very little room for error. Subscription models work at scale but require a large user base before they become viable. Advertising models generate revenue earlier but create a product experience that competes with the premium tier, making it harder to convert free users to paying ones. | Model | Revenue timing | Scale required | Experience trade-off | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Subscription only | Delayed, requires traction first | High | Clean, consistent experience | | Advertising supported | Earlier, lower per-user value | Medium | Interruptions damage emotional state | | Freemium (both) | Mixed, conversion-dependent | High for conversion to work | Requires careful tier design | | Affiliate referral | Transactional, per-action | Low, works at small scale | Additive rather than interruptive | The affiliate model is underused in music specifically. On the memory-sharing proof-of-concept project, integrating Deezer's API created a natural upsell path from short clips to full tracks, and from there to a Deezer subscription, with an affiliate referral fee on each conversion. That secondary income stream did not require a large user base to generate value, which made it appropriate for a product at an early stage. For niche platforms, this kind of layered model, where the core product earns affiliate revenue from a partner platform rather than competing with it directly, is often more sustainable than trying to operate a full licensing stack independently. ## What Streaming Services Can Learn From Community-Led Product Design The streaming platforms that are building the most durable relationships with listeners are, in several cases, the ones that have moved beyond the transactional model of delivering audio and towards building a social context around the listening experience. This is harder than it sounds, and most attempts to add social features to music apps have failed because they grafted a social layer onto a product that was not designed for it. On a concierge app we built for a high-end property development, we ran focus groups with two very different groups. One was high-net-worth individuals, the target customers. The other was people from social housing, who would never be customers. We included the second group because they had something we were trying to build into the product: a genuine sense of community, belonging, and neighbourliness. That quality is typically absent in high-rise developments where residents rarely know each other. The sessions showed that everything came down to communication. We redesigned the product to automate mundane tasks and free up space for social interaction, added personalisation features so residents could see neighbours' interests, and created a social space within the app. The lesson for streaming is direct. The services that will last are not the ones that add a "share this track" button and call it community. They are the ones that understand [what their listeners are trying to communicate](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/what-a-development-team-actually-needs-to-know-about-the-user-before-sprint-one), to themselves and to others, through the music they choose, and then build features that serve that communication rather than interrupting it. ## Conclusion The music streaming market in five years will look smaller than it does today. Not because listening habits will change, but because the economic and emotional logic of the category selects against platforms that built for breadth rather than understanding. The ones that survive will have earned it through specific decisions: a better taste graph, a developer-friendly architecture, a business model that does not require immediate scale to function, and a product experience that makes listeners feel known rather than processed. Catalogue size, feature lists, and download counts are the metrics that dominate industry conversation, and they are also the least reliable predictors of which platforms will still exist in 2030. The reliable predictors are quieter: how quickly the skip rate rises after a user's first week, whether the API is open enough to let other builders create things on top of it, and whether the business model can survive the period between launch and scale without forcing the product to compromise on what made it worth using in the first place. The social football platform that launched iOS-only and had to abandon its subscription model within months is a clear illustration of how a good product can be undone by decisions made before a single user ever opened the app. Platform survival is usually determined that early, in architecture choices, audience definitions, and business model structures that are very hard to reverse once the product is live. If you are building a streaming product, evaluating one to invest in, or trying to understand why a platform you care about seems to be losing ground, the questions worth asking are simpler than the data suggests: does this platform know who it is for, and does it build everything around that person? [Let's talk about your streaming product](https://weareaffective.com/get-started). ## Frequently Asked Questions Which music streaming services are most likely to still exist in 2030? Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music are considered the most stable, largely because they are tied to devices or ecosystems that hundreds of millions of people already use. Tidal and Deezer also have reasonable prospects due to their distinct positioning around high-fidelity audio and developer-friendly tools respectively. Why do some well-funded streaming platforms fail despite having large catalogues? Having a large catalogue is no longer a meaningful advantage, as every major platform now offers access to roughly the same pool of licensed tracks. The pressures that tend to sink platforms are royalty and licensing costs, combined with a failure to build genuine emotional connection with listeners. What makes Spotify stand out from its competitors? Spotify built what is widely regarded as the best music discovery engine in the category, and it invested in podcasts and creator tools before other platforms recognised their strategic value. These decisions, made early, gave Spotify a structural advantage that is difficult for newer entrants to replicate quickly. Why is Deezer considered developer-friendly, and why does that matter? Deezer offers a robust API that allows developers to integrate audio clips without requiring end users to hold a Deezer account, and it supports use cases in the way the platform intended, which avoids the need for workarounds. This openness means that other products get built on top of Deezer, keeping it commercially relevant even when its subscriber numbers are modest. Does catalogue size still matter when choosing a streaming service? For most listeners, catalogue size is no longer a practical differentiator, as the major platforms all offer access to around 100 million tracks. A person streaming several hours of music a day will only ever hear a small fraction of what is available, so the difference between one large catalogue and another is largely meaningless in everyday use. Why do Apple Music and Amazon Music remain competitive despite not leading on features? Both services benefit from being bundled with hardware and ecosystems that enormous numbers of people already own, which lowers the barrier to adoption significantly. Their survival is less about what the platforms do especially well and more about the convenience of having them already present in a listener's existing setup. What does emotional understanding mean in the context of music streaming? Emotional understanding refers to how well a platform responds to the context in which a person is listening, recognising mood, habit, and intent rather than simply matching a search query to a track. Platforms that feel right to their users, rather than just functioning correctly, are the ones people tend to keep using over the long term. What is Tidal's strategy for standing out in a crowded market? Tidal has focused on high-fidelity audio quality and a positioning around artist ownership, which attracts listeners who are willing to pay a premium for a more ethical or audiophile experience. 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