Day 37.
- Total Apple Music trial users: 11 million.
- Breakdown: 9 million on individual, $9.99/mo. trials; 2 million on $14.99/mo. family plan trials.
- Paying subscribers: unknown/unreported.
Source: Apple Music, speaking to USA Today.
- Long-term Apple Music goal: 100 million paying subscribers
Source: New York Times.
Image: marfis75 on flickr, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 (CC by 2.0).
As this is iOs devices only, thats a pretty impressive start. If they get Android app out in the next month its probably safe to say they’re bigger than Spotify by end 2015.
Is it impressive?
People used to go on and on about how Apple have 800 million credit cards. If they can only get 1.3% of their fanboys to sign up after a big launch is that impressive? IDK.
It is already available on PC devices (laptops, anyway, and presumably others).
Given that it is quite a hassle to get started with it (in my experience) 11 million is ‘respectable’. It will really gain traction if it can show an advantage in catalog over Spotify. It has already got Taylor Swift, but one Swift doesn’t make a summer….
…and at that point thy will hit $2B in revenues throwing little over billion to music industry and musicians.
I call it clueless Cue on Ek’s DOPE delivered by Jimmy Iovine!
If what Apple claims is true – that they care about artists and the industry at-large – they may still have a golden opportunity to show it. Apple Music could have been transformative for the industry right out of the gate in taking streaming to the mainstream, but they delivered something far too complicated for the average user, and built on an unsuccessful platform, Beats Music. Even as behind as Apple was on streaming, they should’ve held out and built the service themselves from the ground up. That’s water under the bridge at this point, but here’s to hoping that they are working furiously behind the scenes to make it “just work”.