The Music Streaming Landscape

While Spotify and Apple Music continue to grow their subscriber bases in unison, smaller streaming services are struggling to keep up. According to news reports, Tidal, the company acquired and re-launched by rapper Jay-Z in 2015, is running out of money. Building its strategy largely around exclusive releases from high-profile artists such as Jay-Z himself and his wife Beyoncé, Tidal has struggled to make any significant headway in the past two years.

While the company claims to “have done nothing but grow its business each year” in a statement to The Verge, it hasn’t given an official update on its subscriber count since claiming to have reached 3 million members in March 2016. Earlier this year, reports surfaced alleging that Tidal had inflated its user numbers and that it really only had around a million subscribers, a number that would put the company even further behind its competition.

As our chart illustrates, Spotify and Apple Music lead the music streaming landscape by a mile and there’s no reason to believe that will change anytime soon. There might be enough breathing room for companies such as Pandora and Deezer to survive in their bigger rivals' shadows, but it also wouldn’t be a surprise if some of them disappeared at some point.