“When Spotify and Pandora were starting their streaming services many were quick to point out that Apple was about to be disrupted,” Horace Dediu writes for Asymco.
“This perception continued and became more vocal over the years. Seven years in fact,” Dediu writes. “Spotify collected 20 million paying subscribers while Apple did nothing. Pandora grabbed 80 million active listeners and possibly 4 million paying subscribers while Apple did nothing.”
“At first Apple launched a half-hearted streaming service and then a paid service finally showed up with Apple Music in mid 2015. Since then the company managed to add 15 million subscribers,” Dediu writes. “How does a 15 million user base in 1 year compare with the growth rate for the incumbents Spotify and Pandora? The following graph shows the ramps for Spotify, Pandora and Apple Music since their moments of market entry. The accumulation of users by Apple looks to be the fastest yet.”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote over a year ago:
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 eventually (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).
Spotify could quickly be left with an unprofitable system, with a dwindling music library because they cannot afford to pay music royalties.