Apple Music grows to 50 million subscribers, Apple News up to 85M monthly users during holiday quarter

During Apple's quarterly conference call, the iPhone maker reported its highest quarterly music revenue ever thanks largely to Apple Music, while its overall services business grew leaps and bounds.

Apple's streaming service hit a record 50 million subscribers during the December quarter, CEO Tim Cook said in an earnings conference call Tuesday. This helped buoy Apple's services category — of which music is part of — to its own record high of $10.9 billion.

The last reported number from Apple regarding Apple Music was 50 million users combined across trial and paid tiers, whereas today's number includes only paid subscribers. This most recent update still has Apple behind the industry-leading Spotify, which reported 87 million paying users back in November of 2018.

Recently, Apple updated the Apple Music app for Android to version 2.7 which finally brought long-awaited tablet support.

Verizon also partnered with Apple to start bundling Apple Music with top-tier unlimited plans earlier in 2019.

Alongside Apple Music growth, Apple News is tracking at 85 million monthly active users, according to Cook. Apple Pay also experienced huge gains with 1.8 billion transactions over the course of 2018, up 100 percent from 2017.

For the quarter, Apple reported all-time high revenues of $10.9 billion, a figure that grew 19 percent from the previous fiscal quarter one in 2018.

10 Comments

mwhite 287 comments · 9 Years

About 5 years ago

I'm sure this includes Verizon's free 6 month free trail which for me, my ex and daughter will be gone the first of next month.

Andrew_OSU 574 comments · 6 Years

mwhite said:

I'm sure this includes Verizon's free 6 month free trail which for me, my ex and daughter will be gone the first of next month.

Paid subscribers, not free trials. This number seems probable after their last number update.

davgreg 1046 comments · 9 Years

By any reasonable standard, Apple Music is a flop.

Given years and endless promotion, they have not been able to convert even 10% of the iTunes accounts to this rental service.

jimh2 661 comments · 8 Years

davgreg said:

By any reasonable standard, Apple Music is a flop.

Given years and endless promotion, they have not been able to convert even 10% of the iTunes accounts to this rental service.

What is your measuring system? 50 million people paying for anything is a success by any measure. Pandora had 6 million and Spotify had 75 million paid users as of last May. I know Apple had less than 50 million users last May, but coming from 0 a few years ago is significant. I expect to see Spotify overtaken within 12 months. Both Pandora and Spotify are basing significant head winds...they don't make enough to cover their costs.

radarthekat 3902 comments · 12 Years

davgreg said:

By any reasonable standard, Apple Music is a flop.

Given years and endless promotion, they have not been able to convert even 10% of the iTunes accounts to this rental service.

Interesting take on the situation. I had/have an iTunes account. Back in the day I’d buy a few tracks here and there, maybe 30/year. That’s about $30-40 in annual revenue from me. Now I subscribe to Apple Music because for $120/year I have a virtual music collection of millions of tracks, and many more downloaded to my devices for offline listening than the size of my previous iTunes library. I’m sure Apple is doing just fine raking in $4 billion a year and growing on Apple Music subs.