Business News Digital

British people increasingly turning to subscription services, research finds

By | Published on Friday 17 June 2016

A Nation Subscribed

New research has found that 78% of adults in the UK are now signed up to at least one subscription service online – though that’s covering everything from music and video to food and financial services.

Carried out by YouGov for e-commerce firm Zuora, the research reckons that 13.9 million people in the UK are now signed up to video-on-demand services. In music, it estimates that 5.9 million are signed up to Spotify in one way or another (which sounds a little low), and 2.9 million are currently hooked into Apple Music (which sounds a little high).

In total, it says that 21% of 16-24 are signed up to music services. The three most common reasons given for signing up to video and audio streaming platforms are convenience, not having to buy things, and discovery.

The research also lists reasons that put people off signing up to subscription services of all types. These include worries that it will be difficult to unsubscribe, that there will be price increases, that there is a lack of transparency around subscription deals, and that they will lose track of all the services they are signed up to. People also said that they don’t like being limited to certain products within a subscription.

“The broader message from these survey results”, concludes the report, “is that standalone products are simply no longer sufficient. We increasingly view owning something as simply managing the decline of a physical asset”.

Find the full report here.



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