“Streaming service Spotify leads the on-demand music business today, but it is increasingly facing challenges from a host of competitors, including Amazon.com, Apple, Pandora Media and Alphabet-owned YouTube, Cowen & Co. said in a report Wednesday,” Patrick Seitz reports for Investor’s Business Daily.
“After a decade of decline, the U.S. music industry is expected to see a compound annual growth rate of 4% from 2016 through 2021, led by rising adoption of streaming services, Cowen said,” Seitz reports. “Revenue from on-demand music services will double by 2021 and will rise from 18% of industry revenue this year to 40% by 2021, Cowen predicted.”
“Apple Music directly competes with Spotify’s subscription service,” Seitz reports. “Spotify has 30 million global subscribers, followed by Apple’s 15 million. In the U.S., Spotify has an estimated 8 million paid users, compared with about 4 million for Apple Music, Cowen said.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Students, don’t forget the Apple Music student plan which discounts the service by 50 percent for those who are enrolled in an eligible college or university. More info here.
Apple Music has rendered Spotify’s future decidedly dimmer.
The best customers are those who pay. As demonstrated by years of data, form disparate sources, those paying customers are also significantly more likely to be iPhone owners than those who’ve settled for poor iPhone facsimiles. A healthy portion of these coveted customers will leave for Apple’s comprehensive offering which offers better family rates, more music, likely exclusives, and seamless integration across all Apple devices. It’ll even work with crappy Windows PCs and Android phones… (not that those are likely to be Spotify’s paying customers, but whatever, some of them will join Apple Music and maybe even graduate to Apple devices because of it).
SEE ALSO:
Apple Music accumulating subscribers much more quickly than Spotify or Pandora – June 21, 2016
Taylor Swift dances like no one’s watching in new Apple Music ad – May 12, 2016
Apple offers students half-price $4.99 Apple Music subscriptions starting today – May 6, 2016
One day Apple Music will fix the iTunes files sync (just drop the iCloud guys, it ain’t gon’ work) and I will be able to show Spotify a finger. I wonder how many more years that will take?
Family benefits abound.
I was thinking of dropping my CC from ITunes and quarterly adding a $50 card to my account instead.
Any thoughts?
I thought you had to have a credit or debit card on file to have an account. Anyway, I’m really enjoying Apple Music; load up my iPhone and play it through my car stereo and a Bluetooth speaker at work. I just wish iTunes wasn’t such a hodgepodge mess.
I don’t know that you have to. But i think I will try and switch it out and see what happens. Everything is already configured. Just thinking of ways to be more in control.
Apple Music launched with access to hundreds of millions of Apple accounts in the countries where Beats Music dba Apple Music was available. They gave the shit away to anyone who wanted a trial.
A year later only 15 million customers are paying and one wonders how many are students are on the reduced lunch plan. After almost $3 Billion for Beats, more to fix the defective Speakers, god only knows how much wasted on the streaming station nobody listens to and a year only 15 million. That is kind of like the Edsel- some people bought it but not very many despite a lot of money, effort and hype.
I get that Apple is trying to widen the sources of income for the company, but pissing away $3 Billion for a me too music service from a company famous for the worst headphones on planet earth still seems like an unjustified waste of money. A couple of years back Sirius XM could have been bought for 6-7 Billion , now it would cost almost 20.
If they bought Sirius XM not only would they have a huge selection of channels to stream or deliver via satellite, they would own a huge data network that can stream to cars, planes, boats and people just about anywhere in North America. Think of what services Apple could offer bypassing the Internet Providers with the data delivery that could be repurposed while still offering a huge number of channels.
Apple Music is a flop and was a huge waste of money. I really do not see that they got anything with Beats that they could not have done in-house. Microsoft, Real Networks and others were doing music rental/streaming long before Pandora.