Aussie millennials lead push to ditch their music collections and tune in to streaming services

FORGET about buying your favourite music to own forever. Aussie millennials are leading the obsession to switch on to streaming music services.

Typical of her generation, Rashna Shroff tunes in to streaming music. Picture: Jenny Evans.

MILLENIALS are leading the drive to ditch buying music and tuning in to the cloud, with new research showing nearly three quarters of Australian millennials now stream their music.

Market research firm GlobalWebIndex reveals that 70 per cent of Australians aged 18 to 32 have used a streaming service in the past month, putting Australia up with the biggest users of music streaming services in the world.

The GlobalWebIndex research shows that 34 per cent of Australian millennials have used Spotify in the past month, making it the biggest player in the streaming market while SoundCloud (14 per cent), Pandora (10 per cent) and Apple Music (10 per cent) battle it out for the minor placings.

Spotify’s own figures show millennials globally are responsible for 72 per cent of all weekly streams on the streaming music service.

Millennials are also more likely to stream their music to their smartphone. About two-thirds of Spotify’s millennial customers play their music through their smartphone rather than though their computer.

As for their music tastes, millennials are less likely to listen to rock and more likely to listen to hip hop and pop.

Telco comparison site WhistleOut released figures this week that show that the launch of Spotify in 2012 was a major turning point for mobile data consumption in Australia, sending the typical mobile data usage skyrocketing.

Two years ago, the average amount of data people downloaded on their mobile phone was 0.63Gb a month, with that figure jumping a year ago to 1.14GB and now up to nearly 2GB a month.

Marketing manager Rashna Shroff, 29, of Double Bay in Sydney is typical of her generation.

Ms Shroff said she had been using Spotify for two years and no longer buys music.

For Ms Shroff, the advantages of music streaming includes having all of her playlists in one account across her devices, and using it to guide her in discovering new music based on the songs she already likes.

“It reinforces your personality,” she said.

Ms Shroff said when she used to listen to her music she had bought off iTunes, that tended to be a solitary thing. Now she shares her Spotify playlist with friends.

“Being able to share music is a big thing for me,” she said.

Originally published as Aussie millennials lead push to ditch their music collections and tune in to streaming services