Philip Houska Apple Music is growing. According to the latest information that during announcement of financial results posted by Tim Cook, the music service has reached thirteen million paying users and its growth rate has been very decent since the beginning of 2016. Although it is still not enough for its arch-rival Spotify, if the growth trajectory continues in the same way in the future, Apple Music could have around twenty million subscribers by the end of the year.
“We feel really great about our early success with Apple's first ever subscription service. After several quarters of decline, our music revenue has broken through for the first time," announced CEO Tim Cook.
The music streaming service Apple Music entered the market in June of last year and during that time it received both positive and negative reviews. However, its interim successes cannot be denied, thanks to which it is approaching its biggest competitor in the field of online music streaming, Sweden's Spotify, at an interesting pace.
In February (among other things), Apple Music chief Eddy Cue reported that Apple's music service had 11 million paying customers. Only a month before that was 10 million, from which we can calculate that Apple Music is growing by about a million subscribers per month.
It still has a long way to go to Spotify, which has around 30 million paying users, but both services are growing at a similar rate. The Swedish service had less than ten million subscribers about ten months ago. But while Spotify took six years to reach the milestone of ten million paying customers, Apple did it in half a year.
In addition, we can expect that the fight for customers will only intensify in the coming months. Apple heavily promotes the exclusive content it provides on its service, it drops one ad with Taylor Swift one after the other, for a week will have an exclusive on Drake's new album "Views From the 6" and there are certainly other similar events planned to attract new users. Apple Music also has an advantage over Spotify in its availability in markets such as Russia, China, India or Japan, where the Swedes are not.
