Spotify is neck-on-neck with Apple Music for the market share of music streaming in South Africa and artists — record labels too — know how important it is to maintain dominance on the platform.
Why Spotify dwarfs Apple Music in music streaming
While Apple Music offers great convenience for iPhone users, Spotify dwarfs the iTunes streaming service by a long stretch.
As reported by Digital Trends, in 2019 alone, Spotify added 11 million paid subscribers, a record for the company which now has a total userbase that edges past 120 million.
The pioneering streaming service also has a great reputation for displaying all the important metrics artists need to measure their growth.
At the turn of every year, Spotify rolls out Wrapped Up infographics with cool statistics on how an artist performed.
For the lesser-known acts, the streaming service compiles a personal year-in-review file which is sent to their Spotify for Artists account.
Monthly listeners data is a very important metric
However, the most important metric, which is constantly fluctuating, is the monthly listeners’ data which is found on every verified artist’s profile.
This metric is crucial for many reasons. It tells artists and labels how new music is performing. It also informs them of the impact the said artist has on its target market.
Monthly listeners’ data is essentially the total number of unique users who streamed an artist’s music over a rolling window of 28 days.
If the monthly listeners’ data is in a steady decline, it could mean one of two things: 1) the artist in question is not releasing quality music on a consistent basis, or (2) Spotify users are just not gravitating towards the artist.
We recently compiled a national list of South African artists with the highest Spotify monthly listeners.
This time around, we decided to zoom into Cape Town, an entertainment hub that is on the rise.
Top 10 Cape Town artists with the highest Spotify monthly listeners
Based on our research, these are the 10 Cape Town artists with the highest monthly listeners on Spotify.
1. GoldFish – 1 442 297
2. Beatenberg – 527 840
3. Jeremy Loops – 512 960
4. GoodLuck – 207 865
5. Shekhinah – 122 300
6. Jack Parow – 37 547
7. YoungstaCPT – 31 142
8. Freshlyground – 30 017
9. KA$HCPT – 4 469
10. Mark Akol – 2 933
