It’s been a PR disaster for Spotify these past couple of weeks thanks to the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. The JRE has been the streaming platform flagship podcast after they bought it for $100 million in 2020.
The podcast has been sharing vaccine misinformation and despite pushback, Spotify has stood by Joe Rogan. This has made artists like Nils Lofgren, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and others have the streaming platform remove their songs.
People concerned by the misinformation cancelled their premium Spotify subscriptions and hashtags like #CancelSpotify, #ByeByeSpotify and #SpotifyDeleted went viral on Twitter.
You’d think people deleting the Spotify app would be a boost for rival streaming apps like Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, Tidal, Amazon Music and YouTube Music.
They barely registered significant growth at least when the number of app installs is compared.
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App installs grew by 3.4%, 3.3% and 8.3% for Amazon Music, Apple Music and YouTube Music respectively. New app downloads grew by 750K, 412K, 29K and 168K for Amazon Music, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music and Tidal respectively.
Tidal grew by 30.23% with downloads growing from 129,000 to 168,000.
According to Sensor Tower, an App store intelligence firm, Spotify registered 6 million new downloads when compared to 6.6 million downloads from the week before. It’s a decline but still a huge number when you compare it with rival streaming platforms.
This data continues to prove that Spotify is still king.