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Business News Digital
Apple Music tops ten million subscribers
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 11 January 2016
Apple Music now has over ten million subscribers, according to sources cited by the Financial Times. The last time an Apple exec commented on sign-ups for the firm’s much hyped streaming service, in October, boss man Tim Cook said 6.5 million people were paying while another 8.5 million were still on the three-month free trial.
The jump to ten million assures Apple Music’s status as the second biggest pay-to-access streaming service in the world, and many have noted that in six months Apple secured half as many users as Spotify managed in six years, even without the freemium level the latter insists is necessary to sell £10 a month subscriptions.
Though, of course, Apple’s streaming set up very much benefited from the momentum Spotify kickstarted all those years ago, not to mention its massive iTunes userbase. Since Spotify last declared its user figures, it has moved some way on from 20 million paying customers (and new stats are likely incoming). Indeed, insiders at the streaming firm insist that the arrival of its big new competitor has simply heightened interest in streaming music which has, if anything, further escalated its own growth. Which is probably true.
The record industry seems pleased with both Apple Music’s rapid growth, and Spotify’s performance during the same period. Though few would deny that Apple increasingly pushing streams is only escalating the decline in download sales, meaning the music industry is ever more reliant on the still loss-making (for the digital service providers) streaming sector. Labels, more than anyone, need Apple Music and Spotify to retain at least their current levels of growth throughout 2016, during which time some of the smaller players in streaming music will almost certainly drop out of the market.
Of course, there’s plenty of room for further growth. Taking the most recently declared figures and fudging them slightly for recent sign-ups, there’s still approximately 7,333,985,500 people left to turn-on to premium music streams, so there’s plenty of opportunity there.
Though pretty much everyone agrees that the market for £10 a month streaming is tiny compared to the potential of £2 a month streams, or music-with-movie bundles, or freemium streaming with decent ad income and direct-to-fan up-sell, all of which the music industry also needs to capitalise on in the coming year, as discussed in this here ‘Five key digital challenges’ trends article.
