Emma Howard

However, though, if you look at the Spotify users, though, about 60% of their users overall are free users.

So, you know, although like for some people, there's a lot of value out of the premium service, depending on how you use it and how much you use it.

There are free accounts available.

Now they have restrictions on them.

So you do have to listen to ads after I think every three songs or so.

It limits the number of skips you have.

But it is an option for people if they don't use it a lot or, you know, they don't mind having those ads being played.

So it saves you quite a bit of money.

I spent a lot and I had a massive CD collection that I had to part with eventually because it was just gathering dust and never got used.

But I, of course, I always like to look at the data.

So I actually went and crunched the numbers just to have a look.

So in 2002,

If you look at the average spend per person, so we had a census in 2002, so I removed the children under 14 and looked at on average in the country, we spent 43 euro per person that year on music.

Now, that's for every single adult in the country.

So you can imagine there would have been lots of people probably who never bought a CD or spent any money on music.

And there would have been people who spent kind of 10 or 20 times that.

So I suppose, you know, depending on your usage, like now with something like Spotify, it's not just music you're using it for because you have with the premium, you have audio books, you have podcasts.

And if you look at their, like how people use it, so the monthly active users, if you look at the average listen time, it's 148 minutes audio per subscriber per day.

And one in five people listen to their Spotify several times a day.

So if you're one of those users, you're probably getting a lot more value out of your money than you would have been when you were buying music.