According to the Financial Times, Apple Music has passed 10 million paying subscribers. The milestone comes just 6 months after launch, making Apple Music the world’s second-largest streaming music service, behind Spotify.
This is a massive achievement for Apple, and even more impressive when you compare it to Spotify, which took roughly 4 years to reach 10 million. Spotify is currently miles ahead with over 20 million paying subscribers, but Apple is gaining at a much faster rate.
It’s game on in 2016. Industry analyst Mark Mulligan has now predicted that Apple Music will pass 20 million paid user by the end of this year. If Apple Music continues to grow at this pace, it could potentially surpass Spotify as the largest streaming music service by number of subscribers in 2017.
Early players like Spotify, Deezer and Rhapsody paved a path for other streaming services, but Apple Music is bringing streaming music to a larger mass of people. Apple Music’s growth is fueled by their marketing power, huge customer base, and the fact that tens of millions of iPhones and other Apple devices had the app automatically downloaded upon launch of the streaming service.
And there’s better cash. Several sources have reportedly revealed that labels have received their first full royalty payments and that the checks are bigger than expected. This news has fueled talk regarding Apple Music’s success and shed light on the company’s growth, more specifically the growth of their paid-only service.
That success is likely to put further pressure on Spotify, and other music streaming services who rely heavily on free tiers to drive paid subscriptions.
It’ll slow down when iPhone 7 arrives — people want headphone jacks for tons of reasons.
“Spotify is currently miles ahead with over 20 million paying subscribers, but Apple is gaining at a much faster rate.”
Actually, in terms of revenues , Apple Music is probably already waaay ahead of Spotify even with half the paying customers for a simple reason : All AppleMusic subscribers are paying 10$ a month, while probably half of those 20 millions Spitify subscribers are on the 1$/month for 3 months introductory plan. They probably all cancel after the three months offer, after wich Spotify reintroduces the 1$/month offer again. That way they can claim 20 millions customers even though probably only a third of that are paying the regular 10$ a month.
I’m actually surprised none of the articles about Spotify VS AppleMusic takes this factor into account
“All AppleMusic subscribers are paying 10$ a month”
Not quite. Our family of 5 is paying $3/mo each.
This is not a massive achievement for Apple.
They have the app embedded on tens of millions of devices and are entering a market that Spotify essentially created.
10 million in Apple cult makes 1.2 billion dollars / YEAR
25 million in discounted all over the globe Spotify crowd makes at the most $2.5 billion streaming dollars /YEAR.
MULTIPLY IT 10X (which might never happen) and we will be at 60% of inflation adjusted 1999.
STOP NOW & CONVERT 120K Radio stations, all streamers and 500K public spots to primitive discovery based music stores to see $200B music industry by 2025 at 49 cents per addition to the playlist.
With the collosual device footprint Apple brings, i’d say this represents an under achjievment at best, that being so, its inevitable that they will dominate consumption via streaming soon.
Leveraging this activity to drive exploration of new music and other (predominantly indie) artist related commercial opportunities is required for them to beging to benefit, if not thrive from this soo to be dominant channel.