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Apple Music has eleven million subscribers, licence in place for five Beats channels
By Andy Malt and Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 6 August 2015
So, Apple Music has eleven million subscribers, with two million on the family plan. And this isn’t just idle speculation based on naughty label people chattering to people they shouldn’t chatter to this time. This is according to Apple man Eddy Cue. Yep, it’s official.
And in case you wondered how this makes Eddy feel, well, what do you think? Delighted? No. Elated? No. Enchanted? No. Euphoric? No. Excited? No. Exultant? No. Joyful? No. Jubilant? No. Overjoyed? No. Proud? No. “But how does he feel then”, you ask? “We’re thrilled with the numbers so far”, Cue told USA Today. Ah, of course, “thrilled”. If only I’d gone two more adjectives down the list. Or with the obvious.
Now, technically Apple Music is a premium service of course, which means these stats make it the second biggest premium subscription music service after Spotify, which has 20 million paying customers. Though given that everyone on Apple Music is still on the free trial, really Cue’s stats brag should be compared to Spotify’s total subscriber base of 75 million.
Not so thrilling now, hey? Though eleven million sign ups in a month is still pretty good going, even with all the advantages the tech giant had in its favour. But, of course, none of this really means anything to anyone until the early adopters’ free trials are over. So let’s all regroup in November and work out how really thrilling this all is.
Meanwhile, having got some official word on how Apple Music at large is doing, why don’t we return to speculation? Why not indeed.
The first bit of speculating says that Apple’s label deals actually allow it to launch five radio channels. Now, of course, the first one being called Beats 1 heavily suggested a Beats 2 might follow, though according to this gossip a total of five Apple radio stations could be on the way. Like buses. If the saying was that “five buses” rather then “three” always come along at once. But it’s not, so let’s just forget I said that.
Sources with “knowledge” of the “situation” have spoken to The Verge about the Beats radio bit of Apple’s label deals, adding that Beats 2 might launch in Australia or Asia to provide a live feed when Beats 1 is repeating the twelve hour broadcast it currently puts out each day.
The Verge also claims that the launch of Apple Music hasn’t caused any significant drop in iTunes downloads. Which could mean that Apple Music is working well in tandem with the download store, or that it’s failing in its aim to attract more mainstream users who are still downloading rather than streaming.
And while “no significant drop” is good news, that doesn’t mean downloads aren’t still in terminal decline (indeed, recent declines have been sufficient that “not significant” could still be significant, in the wider picture). That downloads had so clearly peaked was one of the main reasons Apple got into streaming of course, and none of the labels The Verge spoke to seemed to be deluding themselves that the downloads-down-streaming-up trend isn’t here to stay.
Finally, in other non-music related Apple speculation, the company has denied those rumours that it is planning to launch a ‘mobile virtual network operator’ in the US, which would allow it to sell its own mobile tariffs by renting capacity from another operator. A spokesperson told Reuters that Apple has “not discussed nor do we have any plans to launch an MVNO”.
How unthrilling.
