Revealed: Spotify Reaches Half of Australia

A decade after setting up and rolling out in Australia, Spotify has made serious inroads.

Today, roughly half the population of this Great Southern Land presses play on the Spotify app in a regular month.

“Australia has a population of about 25 million, half of them are on Spotify every month,” explains Mikaela Lancaster, Spotify’s managing director of Australia and New Zealand.

“We have 550 million users. And so by that logic, the opportunity overseas is (enormous). We’re already the largest exporter. We’ve grown export streams by about 81% in 2022. We did 30 billion streams overseas. We want to continue to grow that. And Australian music travels really well.”

The Music Network caught up with Lancaster for a rare interview at Spotify House during the inaugural SXSW Sydney.

Since Spotify launched here in 2012, its execs have remained tight-lipped on the streamer’s paid-subscription numbers on a region-to-region basis (on a global scale, that figure has surged past 220 million).

That particular data set for Australia remains under lock and key, though a 50% rate of penetration in Australia is notable for a business whose brand has entered the vernacular as the shortcut for music streaming.

Read the full story here. 

In other Spotify news, competition law expert Amelia Fletcher has penned a letter to Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek, in which she voices her concern about a proposal to introduce a threshold, where the least-popular half-a-percent of its streamed tracks don’t receive a cut of royalties.

“Spotify’s ability to demonetise this tranche of music is exploitative and reflects the huge discrepancy in bargaining power between Spotify and these smaller business users,” writes Fletcher, a recording artist and Professor of Competition Policy at the University of East Anglia.

“The vast majority of these artists and labels really have no other option than to stream through Spotify”, she continues, “given its huge footprint with single-homing listeners, since this is a critical way to establish themselves”.

Spotify has yet to publicly respond to Fletcher’s letter or the controversial proposed threshold, which would affect the lowest 0.5% of streamed tracks.

Read Fletcher’s letter in full below.

I have sent a personal letter to Spotify, regarding its proposed ‘demonetisation’ of those tracks which currently account for the lowest 0.5% of royalty payments. pic.twitter.com/JKiGGKB1Tt

— Amelia Fletcher (@ameliafletecon) November 3, 2023