Michal Marek Despite an uncertain start, it seems that the music streaming service Apple Music is gaining a foothold in the market. The service already has according to Financial Times over 10 million paying users across more than a hundred countries worldwide.
For now, the most successful player on the market is the Swedish service Spotify, which announced in June that it had reached the milestone of 20 million subscribers. More up-to-date numbers are not yet available, but Jonathan Prince, head of Spotify's PR department, the server The Verge revealed that the first half of 2015 was the best ever for the company in terms of growth rate.
Spotify grew by 5 million paying users in the first six months of last year, so it's likely that it now has something like 25 million subscribers. Such growth is a great success for Spotify, especially at a time when Apple Music from Apple is also claiming a say on the scene.
In addition, unlike Apple Music, Spotify also has its free, ad-laden version. If we include non-paying users, Spotify is actively used by around 75 million people, which are still numbers that Apple is far from. Even so, for Apple Music to acquire 10 million paying users in the first 6 months of existence is a decent achievement.
The ability to start a 3-month free trial version, after which the money for the subscription will start to be deducted automatically, is certainly a sign of the rapid growth of paying Apple Music users. Therefore, if the user does not manually cancel the service before the 90 days expire, he will automatically become a paying user.
If we look at the competition between Apple and Spotify, it is evident that these two companies play a primary role in the fast-growing market. Competitive Rdio, which Czech users could use even before the arrival of Spotify, in November declared bankruptcy and was bought by American Pandora. France's Deezer reported 6,3 million subscribers in October. The relatively new Tidal service, owned by world-famous musicians led by rapper Jay-Z, reported a million paying users at the same time.
On the other hand, Apple's success is somewhat degraded by the fact that music streaming is growing at the expense of classic music sales, which Apple has been making decent money from for the past many years. According to the data, they already fell in 2014 Nielsen Music in the United States, total sales of music albums increased by 9 percent, and the number of songs streamed, on the other hand, increased by more than 50 percent. Through services like Spotify, people played 164 billion songs at the time.
Both Apple Music and Spotify have the same pricing policy. With us, you pay €5,99, i.e. approximately 160 crowns, for access to the music catalog of both services. Both services also offer more advantageous family subscriptions. However, if you subscribe to Spotify through iTunes and not directly through the Spotify website, you will pay 2 euros more for the service. In this way, Spotify compensates Apple for a thirty percent share of each transaction made through the App Store.
I personally pay for Apple music, but I mainly use spotify for playlists. AM is way behind in this regard. I am very sorry that private playlists from users are unsearchable without a direct link. In this spotify is ahead and honestly a playlist with liquid dramas of 4000+ tracks or a trance playlist of 1000 tracks cannot be equal to a playlist of 15 songs from Apple Music.