Roger Fingas
Spotify on Monday announced that it has 60 million paid subscribers, keeping it well ahead of Apple Music in the on-demand music industry.
The company had just 50 million Premium subscribers as recently as March, Reuters noted. In June the company said it had over 140 million active users in total, which would imply at least 80 million people are listening to the company's free ad-based tier.
At last month's Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple reported 27 million subscribers. Apple Music lacks any free listening option beyond a three-month trial.
Paid subscriptions generate more revenue than ads, however, and in fact Spotify has been working to convert more of its free customers to Premium, for its own sake and to appease record labels. Recent label negotiations have reportedly involved Spotify paying lower royalties, but agreeing to delay album access for ad-based customers.
The Swedish company is working towards an initial public stock offering, which the Financial Times claimed could happen as soon as the fourth quarter. Shares may appear on the New York Stock Exchange, Reuters said.
In recent months, Apple has been pushing original video content as a way of standing out from competitors like Spotify and Pandora. Its next big effort is ""Carpool Karaoke," coming Aug. 8. Spotify is reportedly looking into promoting podcasts, especially since that involves fewer label payments.
Charles Martin
Malcolm Owen
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
Wesley Hilliard
32 Comments
It will be interesting to see how this competition develops. I wonder how many iPhone users are still using Spotify and if Spotify reducing artist royalties will impact their ability to preserve access to top-tier artist? Furthermore, what happens if Spotify goes public and Apple buys as continue interest? I'm not sure Spotify is up for a shareholding war with Apple's war chest. Just my 2 cents of musing....
Good for Spotify. I'd hate to see the company go out of business. Competition is good for music subscribers. After being around as long as Spotify has, one would think they'd be making money hand-over-fist instead of struggling to stay afloat. AppleMusic has been around for a couple of years and certainly has a respectable number of paid subscribers. It's likely Apple isn't losing any money running the service. Apple certainly could afford to undercut Spotify or use other means to try to keep Spotify struggling. But why should Apple have a need to do something like that? Everyone praises Amazon for killing off other businesses, but it's really nothing to brag about unless you're Jeff Bezos or an Amazon shareholder. I think both Spotify and AppleMusic can coexist peacefully without too much friction as Apple can mainly stick to selling the service to Apple product users. That alone should be enough if Apple has about 750 million iPhones still in operation and that's not even including desktops, laptops and tablets. No point in Apple being overly greedy.
It seems adoption of Music has stagnated with that 27 million paid user count unchanged for a while now, while Spotify continue to grow. Is this going to be another failed experiment by Apple? I thought it would have a much larger user base by now.