Apple Music officially launched in June 2015 and it has grown steadily since then. For that short time frame, the company hasn’t stopped it from reaching impressive highs or accruing sizable numbers. And now, Apple confirms in an interview that Apple Music has 20 million paid subscribers.
Apple Music Has Now 20 Million Paid Subscribers
Apple has aggressively courted deals with artists and labels to carry exclusive music on its platform. In an interview, Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, and one of the main men behind the highly successful Apple Music streaming product revealed that the relatively new platform has hit the 20 million subscriber milestone.
Of course we want more [subscribers] and we want it to go faster—we’re hungry! We can’t forget that, as an industry, we still have very few music subscribers. There are billions of people listening to music and we haven’t even hit 100 million subscribers. There’s a lot of growth opportunity.
Apple Music vs Spotify
Apple Music announced that it had collected hit 10 million subscribers at the beginning of 2016. And added three million Music users since September, bringing its total subscriber count to 20 million. Unlike Apple, Spotify has a free, ad-supported subscription tier that it uses to drive premium subscriber growth. As of June, the company said it had 100 million total users, including non-paid subscribers.
“If they drive more people to pay and buy music then that’s a good thing for all of us,” Cue said. Additionally, Apple revealed that 60 percent of Apple Music subscribers have not purchased content from the iTunes Store, pointing to a shift in media consumption. As reported by MacWorld, whether Apple will stop selling iTunes downloads altogether in favor of streaming is yet to be seen.
According to Engadget, Apple has its own built-in advantage, of course, as Apple Music is already installed on every new iPhone sold. Both companies offer $10 individual subscriptions and a $15 family plan for up to six users. While the growth of both Spotify and Apple Music has been dramatic, Cue points out that there are still only around 100 million paid streaming music subscribers globally.
