Spotify is still top of the music streaming charts

There has been some movement in the streaming sector of late. Although Spotify remains top of the streaming services in terms of paying customers, the latest entrant to the market, Apple, has been gaining ground according to figures in the Financial Times.

It reported that 10 million now pay to access Apple Music, up from 6.5 million in October.

That puts Deezer into second place in terms of paying subscribers, and also silences critics who may have muttered that the end of the three-month free trial Apple offered may have caught some customers by surprise.

Rdio meanwhile has closed up shop, filing for bankruptcy last year and selling up to Pandora.

So how do things stand at the start of 2016?

Spotify

The current reigning champ of the streaming market, Spotify has been putting in the leg work for years.

When it launched in 2008, downloads were the digital format of choice for music fans.

Streaming was the new kid in town and it was an uphill battle to persuade people that it was the way forward.

Fast forward to 2016, and Spotify has at least 20 million paid subscribers, although unofficial estimates are closer to 25 million, and it has 75 million active users.

The number of users of its ad-supported platform is still dominating its figures, but compared with rivals – Deezer has 6 million paying customers and 16 million in total – it’s doing well.

But not everyone is backing the company. Artists, frustrated with the low payment per stream – it’s typically a fraction of a cent per play, although Spotify doesn’t give out the figures – have yanked their music away from the service, including Taylor Swift and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke.

Look for Adele's new album 25 on Spotify and you'll come up blank too; the British singer decided against releasing the album on streaming services just yet, a decision that was also taken with her previous album.

Although Spotify still has a comfortable lead, Apple is trying to close that gap.

How Spotify is hoping to continue to pull in customers is through its music recommendation feature.

Personalised to users, the recommendations are considered to be a key differentiator between services, mainly because if you go to Spotify and it keeps recommending Katy Perry when you’re more Avenged Sevenfold, or Anthrax when you fancy a bit of Michael Bublé, eventually you’ll get hacked off and go elsewhere.

So it was with this in mind that Spotify decided to buy Irish startup Soundwave.

The Dublin-based company, which was founded by Brendan O’Driscoll, Aidan Sliney and Craig Watson, has worked with all the streaming services, but when Spotify wanted to buy the firm, it was a no-brainer: it’s the biggest one out there and it has been in the game long enough.

The idea is that Soundwave, which allowed you to share what you were listening to and keep track of what’s on your friends’ playlists, could feed into that music discovery technology and give Spotify a boost.

Apple Music

A bit of a latecomer to the streaming game, Apple only launched its service in June, hooking people in with a three-month free trial.

That didn’t go down well with everyone; singer Taylor Swift called out the tech firm publicly, saying it was unfair to ask artists to give their music away for free for three months.

Apple backtracked, and Swift has allowed it exclusive access to some of her work, including the 1989 tour documentary.

Now, if estimates are correct, the company has 10 million paying subscribers, who have access to millions of tracks, its radio service and some social features that put artists in touch with fans.

What Apple Music really has going for it is convenience. If you are already an iPhone users, there’s a good chance that the company already has your credit card on file.

If you’ve bought from iTunes, that music is amalgamated into one app with Apple’s streaming service on your iPhone or iPad. You don’t have to do much to get your account up and running.

Out of an estimated 800 million iTunes accounts, 10 million seems like a low number; but not everyone wants or needs a streaming service.

Apple also offered iTunes Radio, which was a free ad-supported streaming service. But as of the end of January, that has been discontinued.

If you want to keep your iTunes Radio listening going, you’ll have to pay up to Apple Music, or content yourself with Apple’s radio station Beats 1, which is the only free option left.

Deezer

The French music firm has been in second place to Spotify for a while, with 6 million paying customers and a total user base of 16 million.

It offers free and premium accounts, with varying functions – the ability to listen to music on your mobile offline, for example – and has deals that have led to a catalogue of 40 million tracks.

Spotify claims 30 million, along with Apple Music and Google Play.

Deezer also has around 40,000 podcasts on its service.

The company was supposed to float on the stock exchange last year, but it cancelled its plans. Instead, it has raised €100 million to fund its continued development, which means it isn’t giving up just yet.

Google Play Music

Apple Music may be available on Android phones, but how many people are going to hand over money to the competition when the trial period is over? Especially when Google offers its own music service, Play Music.

The service has expanded from an online music storage locker in 2011 to a fully fledged streaming service two years later.

You can still store about 50,000 songs in your locker, which means your music can come with you even if your phone runs out of space.

And if you need some extra, or want to listen to something new, you can access Google’s streaming service.

The company started offering a family plan in December, but only to customers in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, France and Germany.

Tidal

Ah, Tidal. There were high hopes for the service that promised to bring a higher standard of audio, but so far, they haven’t been realised.

The trouble with that premise? A lot of people simply can’t tell the difference between Tidal’s high quality stream and the standard music service.

And unsurprisingly, they’re not too bothered.

It doesn’t help that the service was quickly seen as the poster child of spoilt artists, thanks to a ludicrous press conference officially launching their artists’ charter, and then the swift exit of some key figures in Tidal.

And then there was the accidental leaking of Rihanna’s new album tracklist on Tidal that led to the singer putting the album out early.

Just don’t ask Jay-Z about it.