It Turns Out That Spotify Needs Boomers After All

Spotify has experienced tremendous growth over the years, but most of that has been on the backs of the 12 to 34 age group. At age 35 its users decline rapidly and most rapid is the Boomer demographic over 55 group. Until now that was of little concern to the company, but as growth is beginning to plateau for the platform, it’s come to the realization that Boomers may actually be its key to future growth.

Spotify needs Boomers

According to the RIAA, there were 92 million streamers in the United States last year, which was 8 million more than the year before. That translated to over $9 billion in revenue for Spotify, which on the surface seems to mean that all is well. The problem is that the growth was only about half of what it was the year before, which is a scary number for analysts who obsess on this sort of thing.

For the 55+ age group (known as Baby Boomers), Spotify is the streaming platform that they use only 17% of the time, which is why that age group is the key to the platform’s long-term growth. There’s plenty of room for improvement while not so much in the 12 to 34 group.

The company is also not doing that great in the 35 to 54 age group with only 26% getting their music from Spotify (22 % from YouTube), but the problem with that demographic is that most people are head first into career and family, which doesn’t leave all that much time for listening to music.

That said, Spotify aims for more or less passive listeners who aren’t keyed in on every sonic bloom that comes from artist, so you’d think this age group would at least have it on in the background during their day. That doesn’t seem to be the case though.

Even with that, the bottom line is that 9 out of 10 listeners under 55 already listen to online audio, while only about half of the over 55 population do the same. That suggests that this is the one big area for growth left for Spotify, but that’s also an extremely fickle group. Upping that number is going to be a lot harder than it seems.


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