Being a friend of Facebook has its advantages. The company’s f8 conference last week appears to have had a positive impact on some of the music companies most involved with its latest redesign.
Spotify, whose CEO Daniel Ek appeared in the f8 keynote with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, seems to have benefitted the most. According to AppData, Spotify’s number of monthly average users has increased to over 5 million from about 3.4 million the day after the conference. But the actual increase in users could be greater since AppData does not track all Spotify users. Spotify has put its user number at 10 million – an old figure that’s due to be updated – and last week claimed it had 2 million subscribers. So AppData represents just a sample of Spotify users. As a result, its data may reflects the general trends in Spotify user growth but doesn’t accurately measure actual activity.
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Google Trends confirms that U.S. consumer interest in Spotify increased after the September 22 conference. The day after f8, search volume for the term “spotify” was roughly double its volume the previous week.
Competing subscription services Mog and Rdio received only a small bump in U.S. search traffic surrounding the f8 conference as well as a noticeable increase in news reference volume (of measure of the news reports mentioned the services by name). But Mog has hardly been overlooked this month. The company’s Sept. 15 announcement of a free tier of service did result in a brief, 200-percent to 300-percent increase in search traffic and spike in news reference volume.
Turntable.fm, a company that got some media attention, received a slight increase in search volume due to f8. Company co-founder Seth Goldstein appeared on a panel following Zuckerberg’s keynote.
Other services to announce partnerships with Facebook don’t have names that lend themselves to investigation on Google Trends. Rhapsody and Slacker are both music services and words that can be used in other contexts. Neither show an f8-related gain in U.S. search volume. Deezer is based in France and does not have enough search volume to show graphs at Google Trends.