Smart speakers strengthen music streaming
Anyone who owns a smart speaker, for example an Amazon Echo device, listens to more music and also often subscribes to the streaming service of the respective manufacturer. This could change the competitive situation in the music streaming market.
Marketing researchers from the University of Hamburg Business School conducted a representative study of 1518 people in Germany to find out about their listening habits. The result: while users without smart speakers listen to music for an average of around 16 hours per week, people with smart speakers listen for more than 20 hours.
There are also differences in the use of streaming services and paid subscriptions: the proportion of paid services among users of smart speakers is 73 percent and only 39 percent among those who do not own a smart speaker.
Users of smart speakers also appear to prefer the services of their respective speaker manufacturers: for example, 29.3% of people who own an Amazon smart speaker use the company's own paid platform Amazon Music Unlimited. For people without a smart speaker, this figure is just 11.0%. The situation is similar for Google Smart Speaker owners: they use YouTube Music significantly more often than users without a smart speaker (17.3% more).
Original publication:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08997764.2025.2494994
