Spotify’s new report on Lowlands festival highlights impact of streaming

Spotify’s Director of Economics Will Page has penned a new report on the company titled “Adventures in the Lowlands”, which analyses the service’s impact in the Netherlands and in particular its effect on live music audiences following the popular Lowlands festival.

First of all promoter Mojo Concerts found out that out of 2,000 Lowlands attendees interviewed, over two thirds used Spotify. According to an additional survey carried out by Spotify with attendees, 70% of those who used Spotify had used it to discover new bands prior to attending the event, whilst 79% used the service to revisit bands they had seen during the festival. 48% of respondents also stated that they checked out bands they had missed after the event.

This is reflected in the stats published around two bands who performed well-received sets at Lowlands. The first is up-and-coming Swedish act First Aid Kit who saw their Dutch Spotify streams increase by 135% following the festival. The second is the UK singer-songwriter Sam Smith who saw streams increase by 22% in The Netherlands following his festival performance, in spite of the fact that he was already pretty popular there prior to the event.

The company’s post also remarks that the bulk social media activity around the festival - a key part of the public’s reaction these days - was concentrated around just 8 to 10 days before, during and after the festival. This shows that social media reaction is very much “in the moment” whilst the festival can have a long-term effect on streaming consumption.

Not all positive spikes in streaming activity are necessarily the result of new fans coming onboard though, so it is important to see not only how many times your music is being streamed but also how many people are streaming it. For example data around Dutch artist Jett Rebel shows that streams grew 45% around the festival performance, but it only increased the number of people listening by 10%, suggesting that existing fans made up the bulk of the additional streams and re-discovered him thanks to the festival.

The takeaway of the study is that streaming can strongly contribute to the success of a festival allowing fans to engage with the event for longer - before and after - which improves promoters’ chances of selling tickets and artists’ chances of gaining new fans.

Obviously Spotify has its own agenda in publishing the study - to forge more partnerships with festivals who want to engage their audiences long-term - but the numbers showcased here are a clear reminder that events like Lowlands require a year-round effort and that promoters can benefit from streaming services’ effectiveness in connecting fans and artists.

Artists today are already able to sell merchandise on their own artist pages via Topspin and BandPage. It’s going to be interesting to see whether Spotify may consider, in the future, allowing events to also have their own Spotify pages where they can showcase playlists featuring artists that are booked to play and promote tickets for the event.

Today, the experience of finding festival-related playlists is still relatively fragmented on Spotify. You may be alerted to the fact that an act you already follow is playing a festival nearby thanks to Songkick, but otherwise you will have to actively look for artists that are playing or hope that someone else has put together a playlist on - say - Glastonbury 2014 that you can subscribe to.


(Andrea Leonelli)