Neil Young’s Streaming Numbers Soared for a Week After Spotify Pullout, but Have His Fans Migrated for Good?

variety.com:

Chris Willman Music WriterHow will Neil Young fare as a streaming presence now that he’s taken his music off Spotify, the service that accounted for close to half of his streaming revenue prior to his initiating a break amid the ongoing Joe Rogan?The long-term effect on consumption for Young’s songs remains to be seen or felt, and the veteran rocker may yet see his numbers sink without consumers being able to access his material via music’s most popular digital destination.

But in the two weeks since he made his stand, two trends became evident: first, a big surge in streaming attention as fans followed him to other services… followed by a return to the kind of numbers he had in normal times, when he was still on Spotify — but, of course, without Spotify.

Following that initial boon, then, the most recent numbers, while on the low side of what Young had been averaging previously, still count as impressive, and suggest that at least a portion of the listeners that used to hear him on Spotify are seeking him out on a new platform.

Naturally, though, observers cynical of music fans making wholesale shifts will wait it out longer to see if some of the streams Young is picking up now on alternative services are residual “protest” streams that will diminish over time.Merck Mercuriadis, whose Hipgnosis Songs Fund had acquired half of the rights to Young’s publishing catalog, said in an interview with Bloomberg published Tuesday that “the interesting thing about Neil is that his consumption has gone up in the two weeks since he came off the service,” and that “we’re at 38% up in streaming alone.” But the full range of data is a little more complicated than that.Variety looked at numbers provided by MRC Data since the beginning.