Apple Music subscriber base grew 36% in 2019, second only to Spotify

Music streaming subscriptions were up 32% globally last year, with Apple Music maintaining a comfortable second place position behind Spotify, according to newly published estimates.

Apple Music, as part of the company's broader services push, has been steadily gaining ground in the streaming industry. But while the service's subscriber base has blossomed since its launch in 2015, Spotify remains the global market leader.

New data published on Friday backs that up. According to research from Counterpoint Research, Apple Music trailed behind Spotify in total market share throughout the 2019 calendar year. However, the research firm adds that Apple's total subscription base actually grew 36% year-over-year, echoing the broader increase across the industry.

Apple has been making improvements to its service, including "the introduction of night mode, curated playlists to target a group, etc," research analyst Abhilash Kumar said.

Spotify grabbed 31% of the total revenue and 35% of total paid subscribers globally. Apple Music was in second place with 24% of total streaming revenues and a 19% share of the total paid subscriptions.

In third place was Amazon Music, which has been slowly increasing its market share. It had 15% of the market, up from 10% in 2018. In January, Amazon Music announced that its streaming service had 55 million customers worldwide.

While Apple hasn't released exact figures for its paid subscribers in 2019, Apple Services Chief Eddy Cue said in June of that year that the service had passed 60 million subscribers. That was the last official word from Apple, though it's likely that the number of subscribers has grown significantly since then.

As of October 2019, Spotify announced that it had 248 million listeners globally, though that includes the service's ad-supported free tier. Apple Music, by comparison, doesn't offer a free tier.

Counterpoint believes that global music subscriptions will grow more than 25% in 2020, with numbers exceeding 450 million paid subscribers by the end of the year.

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13 Comments

chasm 3592 comments · 10 Years

About 4 years ago

Apple Music appears to be growing at a faster rate than Spotify, and also manages to a) pay artists and b) turn a profit -- two things Spotify cannot really claim to have done (though it spends a lot of time in court trying not to pay artists).

Because of this, I prefer Apple Music -- though I consider the two services to be roughly equal in end-user experience.

CloudTalkin 916 comments · 5 Years

chasm said:

Apple Music appears to be growing at a faster rate than Spotify, and also manages to a) pay artists and b) turn a profit -- two things Spotify cannot really claim to have done (though it spends a lot of time in court trying not to pay artists).

Because of this, I prefer Apple Music -- though I consider the two services to be roughly equal in end-user experience.

An edit is needed in your quote. All streaming services pay content owners; including Spotify. You may be implying that Apple pays more, but that ain't what you said. Plus, streaming services primarily pay labels and labels pay artists. So artists may not actually be getting paid more. To be fair, that's a bit nitpicky. I knew what you meant, so let's just say Apple does pay more. Turn a profit though? A l'il bit of wishful thinking on your part wouldn't you say? Apple has certainly never said they turned a profit on AM. They've never even implied it. Not sure where you got the idea.

On topic: Streaming music is growing. Looks like all the major players grew. Seems more and more of the public is finding perpetual services an acceptable proposition.

CloudTalkin said:

An edit is needed in your quote. All streaming services pay content owners; including Spotify. You may be implying that Apple pays more, but that ain't what you said. Plus, streaming services primarily pay labels and labels pay artists. So artists may not actually be getting paid more. To be fair, that's a bit nitpicky. I knew what you meant, so let's just say Apple does pay more. Turn a profit though?

Fair enough, I can no longer edit my original post, but you're correct: Spotify does pay most artists something (though they do spend time in court defending why they're not paying some of them), and Apple Music doesn't have that problem and pays more. This alone is enough to prefer Apple Music, but I apologise for going a bit hyperbolic about Spotify's stinginess. The part about them not making any money at it is both weird and true, though.

I base my claim of AM turning a profit on the facts that a) Services generally reports double-digit growth, and AM is part of that and b) the rate of growth in AM suggests that it is profitable (though unlikely to be the most profitable part of Services, of course).

Even assuming AM has added zero users since they passed the 60M paid users mark, at an average of $5/month per user (trying to average out both individual and family subscriptions, conservatively), that's $10M per day. I don't know it for a fact, but I'm pretty sure there's room for profit in there even after paying the copyright holders and infrastructure costs. And even if the service hasn't paid back its initial development and running costs yet somehow, it will rather quickly if it continues to grow -- since costs should now be stable yet income is growing.

digitol 276 comments · 15 Years

Apple Music is a horrendous mess. Apple should buy Spotify. Actually streaming services as a whole, suck... music/movies expiring and "going away" is a horrible business model and a disservice to us all. Sad. Another mess and disservice to us all is the RIAA, they need to sunset.

chasm said:

CloudTalkin said:

An edit is needed in your quote. All streaming services pay content owners; including Spotify. You may be implying that Apple pays more, but that ain't what you said. Plus, streaming services primarily pay labels and labels pay artists. So artists may not actually be getting paid more. To be fair, that's a bit nitpicky. I knew what you meant, so let's just say Apple does pay more. Turn a profit though?

I base my claim of AM turning a profit on the facts that a) Services generally reports double-digit growth, and AM is part of that and b) the rate of growth in AM suggests that it is profitable (though unlikely to be the most profitable part of Services, of course).

You really can't do what you're doing and come away with an assumption of profit. The double digit reported growth for the Services category is revenue growth, not profit. Apple music being a part of Services does contribute to the category's but that's all you can draw from that. You can't make any assumptions about the profit of AM based on the overall success of the category. The App Store could run at a massive profit. So could Apple Care or any of the others. AM could hypothetically run at a negative profit and the Services category could still have double digit growth in revenue.

The rate of growth of AM doesn't suggest profitability. It suggests growth. Nothing more. Cook himself said AM doesn't have to be profitable to achieve it's goals. The same goes for Amazon and Google. All three of them can subsidize music as a loss leader. Are they doing that? IDK. Just like I don't know if any of them run their music services at a profit. There's nothing out there that supports an assumption either way. Math certainly doesn't.