Survey details digital music dominance in Nordic nations

Polaris Nordic Alliance chartNordic nations have 8 million streaming music users. That’s one of the takeaways from a survey conducted by the Polaris Nordic Alliance, a coalition of music collecting societies. The poll covered the roughly 17.8 million Internet users between the ages of 15 and 65 in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark.

According to the results, those four nations have 13.8 million users of digital music, which the Alliance uses to mean both digital downloads and online streaming. Music was the top online activity for the respondents, with 78% of them reporting use of digital music services in the past year. That figure poses an interesting counterpoint to the 20% of respondents who said they had paid for some form of digital music, either downloads or streaming.

Part of the reason for the low percentage of buyers could be the platforms of choice. YouTube was the most popular with 11.8 million users, followed by Spotify at 7 million. Spotify does have free and paid tiers, but the survey didn’t break out how many people listen on each of them. The paid music trend did show some change by country. Finland posted the lowest number of buyers in the past year, with 13% of its Internet users paying for music, while Norway had the most with 36%. The other two fell in the middle: Sweden at 24% and Denmark at 23%.

Anna Washenko