"Alexa, play that song again" - How the Amazon Echo has affected music consumption

The sudden boom in technological developments over the last decade or so have given us all sorts of gizmos and gadgets. A favourite among them being the Amazon Echo featuring Alexa— your own virtual assistant. In fact, as stated by TechCrunch, nearly 70% of smart-speaker users in the US have opted for the Echo. At Blokur, we recently did a feature on the Amazon Alexa in our 2020 Songwriters Review— a comprehensive report highlighting the profiles of the top songwriters of 2020. Here, we took a look at how this sleek little AI affected music consumption on its corresponding platform, Amazon Music.

With its strictly voice recognition-based functioning, searching for new music with the Echo is quite uncommon. Consumers typically use their Echo’s to request songs that they already know. This contributes to the reason why fan favourites from a few years ago — such as Perfect by Ed Sheeran, which hit the charts in 2017 — remain at the top of the list on Amazon’s popularity rankings. This, and the communal placement of the Echo in family homes, lends itself to the popularity of more family-friendly songs as well. This means that songwriters like Kristen Anderson-Lopez, writer of Frozen’s Let it go and Coco’s Remember me, can be found listed on Amazon Music’s top 100 songwriters.

Prime is also a big part of Amazon’s music story. For the 150 million Amazon Prime users, Prime music comes at no additional cost, with access to Amazon Unlimited music at a discounted price. Targeting Prime users this way increases the age demographic of their audience, who usually end up being older than the 18–36 demographic of Apple or Spotify. According to Financial Times,14% of the subscribers for Amazon Music were aged 55+, whereas for Spotify the numbers stand at only 5%. This contributes to more nostalgic pieces, favoured by the older audience, being classed as one of Amazon’s top 10 songs, such as Journey’s 1981 song Don’t Stop Believin’. This could also be why the seven rock songs in Amazon’s top 100 were all released in the last century.

For all of the major music services it is possible to see the business model reflected in the users’ listening habits. In Amazon’s case, look at the data from any angle and it’s clear the Alexa effect is behind a listener profile unlike any of the other platforms.

For more information and statistics on Amazon music and Amazon Alexa, download our 2020 Songwriters Review.