The Rise of Spotify in Indonesia

Music is being consumed daily in many different ways. Unfortunately in Indonesia, piracy has become one of the more popular ways for people to enjoy their favorite tunes. According to The Recording Industry Association (ASIRI) in 2016, Indonesia saw over 2.8 billion illegal song downloads annually. As a result, Indonesia’s recording industry suffered an annual loss of Rp 14 trillion.

The emergence of music streaming platforms might answer this challenge of overcoming piracy. A report from YouGov shows that online streaming has contributed to the declining number of illegal downloads in the UK. Spotify, the biggest music streaming platform worldwide with over 100 million premium users and more than 200 million monthly active users, is often labeled (or questioned) as the savior of the music industry. Online streaming’s impact on music piracy is definitely still up for debate as people are still able to rip music from and hack premium access to these platforms. Nevertheless, these new media have transformed the way listeners access their music.

So, what about Indonesia? Has this new wave of music consumption changed the landscape in Indonesia? It’s difficult to answer these questions since Spotify and other online streaming platforms do not release their numbers on both total active users and the total quantity of music consumption per country. However, it was reported in 2017 that Indonesia became the second-biggest market for Spotify in Asia, only behind the Philippines.

For the reasons above, we decided to focus our research on Spotify. We will analyze if Spotify has, indeed, increasingly become more popular in Indonesia by looking at the Top 200 streaming data. These data can be accessed through this link.

Our data set covers streaming numbers of Top 200 songs in Indonesia each week, from tracking week that starts on December 30, 2016, to the tracking week of August 2, 2019. From these data, we can see that there is a significant increase in total weekly streams from the start of 2017 to mid-2019. Spotify Indonesia has the biggest weekly total so far on the week of July 5, 2019, with over 81 million streams. This number is more than five times the total streams during the week of December 30, 2016.

Another way to look at Spotify’s rise in popularity is by identifying the composition of the top 200 songs based on the artists’ origin. Our assumption is that the increasing number of active users will correlate with the decrease in the Western (i.e. Anglo-Saxon)-dominated music consumption. This is due to the diversification of Spotify Indonesia’s userbase as it grows larger, which leads to a more eclectic taste in music.

The figure above confirms this assumption. As Spotify attracts more users with varying preferences, the number of non-Western (i.e. Indonesian and Korean) songs that entered the Weekly Top 200 chart has also increased. If we break down the numbers, then we can see that at the beginning of our data coverage, Western music dominated the chart with 152 songs (76%), while there were only 38 Indonesian, 9 Korean, and 1 Latin songs. Fast forward to the week of August 2, the number of Western songs in the chart have decreased immensely that there were more Indonesian songs in the top 200 than Western songs. A total of 114 songs in the chart were from non-Western artists, with 99 from Indonesia and 15 from Korea, compared to “only” 86 from Western artists.

The streaming figures further confirm this finding. In the beginning, Western music had more than 13 million streams compared to only 1.9 million streams from Indonesian songs and less than half a million from Korean songs. However, by August 2019, Indonesian songs slightly edged Western songs by 137,063 streams. Korean songs have also increased more than 10 times to approximately 5 million streams weekly.

As a conclusion, we can see how there is a significant increase in music consumption by streaming in Indonesia, as represented by the data from Spotify. However, further research needs to be done to confirm whether the increase in consumption would lead to the rise in popularity for non-Western pop songs.

Author: Josia Paska Darmawan