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Today's Topics
Today we're exploring:
- There are 2 streaming wars raging in the world of content right now - who is winning in the world of music?
- China has imposed a lockdown on some of its cities to try and contain the spread of coronavirus. Just how big are these cities? And how easy is it to contain them?
The numbers behind the numbers:
1 chart and 1 table, 732 words, 4 mins 15 seconds to read.
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These days it's never been easier to listen to music - and it feels like one of those nice outcomes that's been pretty good for businesses, artists and for consumers. The music industry is back to healthy growth (up 10% last year) and we all get to listen to as much music as we want for $10-15 a month.
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While the streaming wars on our screens is just getting going, in the world of music Spotify has had some competition for a while, with Apple Music launching back in 2015. But it's not just Apple that Spotify has to worry about these days. Amazon Music just announced this week that they hit 55 million users (of which they claim "nearly all" are paying). That leaves them pretty close to overtaking Apple, who reported 60 million paying users last summer.
Music keeps it civilised
For now, most of the record labels seem happy to have their artists music on multiple platforms. In the world of TV and movies, everybody isn't as happy to share. Let's hope music never goes that way in the future.
Spotify keeps its crown
The chasing pack are growing quickly, but so is Spotify. The latest numbers we've compiled in the chart above have them on 113m paying users. That's a good lead, but they aren't sitting on their laurels - they're betting big on podcasts - hoping it can differentiate them from the others. Last year they went on a $400m spending spree in which they bought 3 podcast companies.
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The coronavirus outbreak in China has now claimed the lives of 26 people. In response, Chinese officials have imposed travel restrictions that affect up to 20 million people in the province of Hubei, including the capital Wuhan, where the virus started.
Imposing a lockdown on a city of any size is difficult enough, but by any measure Wuhan is an absolute mega metropolis. According to data from the United Nations Wuhan is the 9th largest urban agglomeration (city) in China, with over 8m residents. That makes it only slightly smaller than Chicago and London - imagine the logistical work needed to lockdown a city of that size.
The fear of course is that the virus will spread to another one of China's major cities, and there are a lot of them...
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The table above has the 30 largest cities in China, but this list could have gone on and on. China actually has no fewer than 134 cities with a population of more than a million people.
The good news when it comes to the coronavirus, is that these large scale containment efforts have been implemented pretty quickly across the major cities affected. So far China appears to be making good use of its experience from the 2003 outbreak of SARS - which killed 774 people - to handle this latest threat.
Note: Accurately counting the populations of cities is much more art than science (city boundary definitions etc. make it difficult). Running a quick Google search for "Wuhan population" throws up a figure of 11.1m from Wikipedia (the UN estimate was 8.3m), but the source for the 11m figure comes from a webpage in Chinese that was difficult to verify. Hence, to make things as consistent as possible we've used just one data source for all of the cities (and their comparisons) from the UN.
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Data Snacks
1) 15-year-old tennis player Coco Gauff has done it again - this time beating the defending Australian Open champion Naomi Osaka in the 3rd round. Highlights here.
2) Will you ever fill up your CRM with 1,000,000 contacts? Probably not, but that's how many you can have with the HubSpot free CRM that helps you easily organise and nurture your leads.**
3) The Athletic just raised another $50m of venture capital to keep writing premium sports content.
4) Google gets around 4 million searches every minute... but this week they all started to look slightly different. Google has changed the way ads appear, making them less distinguishable from the organic search results.
5) The Doomsday Clock just moved to 100 seconds to midnight, citing nuclear war and climate change as existential threats to humanity.
6) Rookie Zion Williamson racked up 17 points in just 4 minutes on his NBA debut. Welcome to the league.
**This is an affiliate snack. If you use or purchase the product, we may be compensated in future.
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Have a wonderful weekend, we'll see you next Wednesday.
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