Mikey Campbell
Apple SVP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue provided a brief update on the state of Apple Music on Monday, saying the company's streaming music service now boasts some 38 million subscribers.
Cue revealed the fresh Apple Music figures during an onstage interview at the South by Southwest festival, saying the service recently gained two million new subscribers in a little over one month. Further, another 8 million are currently listening to Apple Music on a trial basis.
Adding color to the hard numbers, Cue said the combined subscriber bases of Apple Music and rival Spotify equate to more than 100 million members.
Last month, Spotify announced plans to go public, and in doing so revealed it has 71 million paying users. In 2017, the service recorded 159 million monthly active users who streamed 40.3 billion hours of content, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings show.
While 100 million people is a large group, Cue said there is plenty of room to grow. In his talk, the Apple Music chief estimated there to be about two billion people in the world who could be subscribers of Apple Music, Spotify or some other streaming service. Hammering the point home, Cue added that more than half a billion customers access the App Store every week, all of whom are ripe for subscription.
He went on to downplay the numbers game, saying Apple is more concerned about artist royalties. The amount of money artists make through streaming platforms has long been a hot button topic for the music industry, with megastars like Taylor Swift withholding their respective catalogs from services whose terms were deemed unacceptable.
"The real opportunity for music — and it's not about Spotify or us or the labels, it's about artists — is how do they get their music to everyone around the world and how do they get compensated for that," Cue said. "We both have to grow by significant amounts in order to get to the numbers which it should."
During his talk with CNN technology reporter Dylan Byers, Cue commented on Apple's recently announced acquisition of digital magazine subscription service Texture. He also dismissed rumors that the company was looking to purchase Netflix, instead saying Apple is "all in" on original content created by its in-house entertainment team.
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Wesley Hilliard
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27 Comments
I find Apple Music, along with iTunes Match, to be all I need for my listening experience. I have a sizable library of iTunes purchased music as well as ripped CDs of music that simply isn’t available in the general market (specifically Theatre Pipe Organ Music, The Mighty Wurlitzer and such). iTunes has dutifully uploaded all of my ripped CDs and they are available in iCloud. As such I do not need to store any of my library locally on my iPhone which saves a lot of storage space. Apple Music streaming is perfectly fine for me and I have a lot of albums attached to my library.
i simply don’t get all the griping about Apple Music and iTunes. They just work for me. I also switched to the yearly subscription model. $99/yr is a good deal in my book.
I'm one of those 8 million trial users. Started mine after purchasing a HomePod (I wonder how many of those trials began with the purchase of a Home Pod). Love both and will be looking to upload my library to iCloud.
If Apple made Apple Music more platform agnostic I would give it a go. Probably like a lot of people I use Spotify just because I know it will work everywhere, could easily be convinced to switch, but I don't trust Apple to make my life easy on Apple Music.
Could say the same about Amazon Music too, but they need to sort their relationship with Google out.