Have you ever wondered how it would look if music streaming wasn’t invented? The variety of streaming services make it easy for the music lovers to enjoy the music anytime and anywhere without the need to buy the CDs and load songs into the devices manually. Now music lovers can play and share their favorite music from all over the world without the need to buy every single or album.
Streaming services have a massive impact on the whole music industry, it formed 75% of the revenue of the industry. Before the streaming services, CDs sales weren’t profitable since piracy and illegal online sharing was the cheapest and easiest way for consumers to get access to music via the internet.
The MENA region has plenty of music lovers, artists, and major record labels. There is a big interest in using streaming services like Anghami; the first music streaming service in the Middle East since 2012. But the play alone role has ended since Spotify and Deezer came to the MENA market and the competition started on the social media conversations before the launch of each.
During the last quarter of 2018 (Oct 2018 – Dec 2018) of monitoring, we analyzed a sample of online users mentions about Anghami (305.5K mentions made by 84.63K engaged users) in both Arabic and English with different variations. out of the analyzed mentions, #Nowplaying mentions got 46% of the mentions made by 27K unique users and gained around 93.25K engagement.
This empowers the insight that sharing music from Anghami on social media will get the audience interest in using the app to play and share their favorite music.
A good recommendation hint for any streaming service is to encourage the audience to share the music on their social accounts (e.g. share more to win free premium trial experience) will help to increase the reach and stand rival in front of competitors.
Analyzing a representative sample of mentions about Anghami and other music streaming competitors; Deezer and Spotify we found that around 13% of these mentions were interested in the rivalry between these apps. tweets about the rivalry got higher engagements during Nov 2018 in alignment with the launch of Spotify in the Middle East.
A lot of users stated that the competition was in their favor as each service will present their best features and offers.
Digging deeper into this sample we analyzed the users’ demographics and figured out what users have liked and disliked about each music service.
Measuring the positive reviews for each app through Twitter mentions, we found that Anghami had many loyal users who preferred using it no other services. The majority (40%) of loyal users were from Lebanon who was encouraging the use of their national service.
Anghami Pros
Anghami Cons
Spotify Pros
Spotify Cons
Deezer Pros
Deezer Cons
In the end, we found that there is no one single choice for MENA users to stick to it. Music lovers preferred music apps based on different metrics and the single user could use many apps at the same time.