Last.fm, Pandora, and Lala are growing in popularity
As our connection to the web gets increasingly fast, coupled with faster processors, the possibility to stream video and audio becomes easier. In the early days of the web (yes, we’re arguably still in the early days) it was crucial to keep your website’s page size down. You would do this by compressing photos and images into smaller files so people with dialup wouldn’t grow impatient when they visited your website. Now, page size isn’t such an issue, and websites are growing in size. Along with this, video and audio quality is streaming at higher qualities around the web.
Because of this, the concept of moving your music collection to the cloud is a reality, and a growing number of people are beginning to realize this. Lala’s unique visitors in October 2008, according to Compete, was 173,457. In October, 2009, this number increased to 546,075 unique visitors. It’s our speculation that the November statistics will reveal an even more dramatic jump in unique visitors.
More people are visiting Pandora and Last.fm to stream music. Last.fm’s October, 2008, unique visitors numbered 1,832,899, compared to 3,158,218 in October, 2009. How has Pandora fared? Pandora had 2,362,735 unique visitors in October, 2008, and 4,780,684 a year later.
Compete’s site rankings also show that music accessing service sites are gaining ground. Lala was ranked #10,073 in October, 2008, and rose to #3,562 in 12 months. Pandora jumped from #563 to #275, and Last.fm climbed from #752 to #465.
As Google continues to promote Lala through music related searches, we’ll most likely see a steep rise in the number of Lala users. None of this would have been possible ten years ago, let alone five years ago. But because of technological advances, streaming our music collections over the web is beginning to grow on a massive scale.
Note: We would also compare Spotify, but since users stream music from their application, looking at their website statistics wouldn’t reveal their growing popularity. Also, as a reader pointed out, these statistics reflect the US, since Lala and Pandora are only available in the US, as well as Google’s music search results.
Though it’s a little dated, for more info about speed and traffic stats, visit this site.