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Kiwis rack up 2,200 YEARS worth of Spotify music...
Thu, 22nd May 2014
FYI, this story is more than a year old

This week, music streaming service Spotify, is celebrating its second anniversary in New Zealand.

To celebrate, Spotify has revealed how-mad-about-music the nation is and just what they’re listening to.

Since Spotify’s arrival in May 2012, New Zealanders have streamed an immense 2,200+ years worth of music. Putting that into context, that’s the time it would take to:

* Travel to the moon on the Apollo 11 spacecraft over 225,000 times

* Grow 333 metres of hair (1/3 km)

* Build New Zealand’s tallest man made structure, the Auckland Sky Tower, 800 times

* Live out 27 average lifetimes

The data also shows the diversity of music tastes with the likes of Eminem, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Katy Perry and Imagine Dragons all frequent sounds in local ears.

Though, it was Auckland’s very own super star, Lorde, who takes the top spot as Most Streamed Artist in New Zealand (against both global and local musicians).

Appetite for the 2 time GRAMMY-award winner has been enormous, with the singer topping both the Top 5 Most Streamed Albums list and dominating the Top 5 Most Streamed Local Tracks with 4 out of 5 entries.

Other homegrown talent like Six60, Shapeshifter, Stan Walker and Fatty Freddy’s Drop emerged to round off the top 5 Local Artists and showcase New Zealand as a hotbed of musical excellence.

With seven million playlists created in NZ over the last two years, interesting insights about the nation’s other interests have surfaced.

For example, ‘love is in the air’ with over 136,000 romantic playlists logged. Fitness fanatics are also sweating it out to a beat with close to 44,000 playlists featuring words like “running”, “exercise”, “sport” or “workout”.

These insights also confirm the nation’s chilled out attitude: almost 62,000 “relaxation” and 17,000 “Zen” playlists have been created.

On a local level, Auckland just pips Wellington to the post as most musically switched on city, creating more playlists per capita over the last two years.

The musical flavour of the moment (over the last month) appears to be a close tie between Clean Bandit’s ‘Rather Be feat. Jess Glynne’ and Iggy Azalea’s ‘Fancy’ with each track currently vying for most streamed song across all regions.

Bucking trends, however, is the West Coast, which has streamed rock icons, Queen, more than any other artist in the last month – compared to other regions opting for the likes of Eminem and Ed Sheeran.

"New Zealand is a nation with an immense passion for music and Spotify is proud to be part of that," says Kate Vale, Managing Director for Spotify ANZ.

"Two years have flown by - this year alone we've rolled out a world class partnership with Telecom NZ, a sleek new design, improved functionality, and free Spotify on mobile and tablet devices, making it easier to listen to, discover and share more music than ever before.

"Thank you NZ for making us the number 1 music streaming destination of choice."

Spotify today also announced that it has 10 million paying subscribers and more than 40 million active users in 56 markets worldwide.

Since Spotify first launched in 2008, users have created over 1.5 billion playlists, collectively creating or updating over 5 million playlists each day.

"We've had an amazing year, growing from 20 markets to 56 as people from around the world embrace streaming music," adds Daniel Ek, CEO and Founder, Spotify.

"10 million subscribers is an important milestone for both Spotify and the entire music industry.

"We’re widening our lead in the digital music space and will continue to focus on getting everyone in the world to listen to more music."