“Apple Music officially has more than 20 million paying subscribers,” Tim Ingham reports for Music Business Worlwide. “The Cupertino company just confirmed the milestone to MBW – and it comes less than 18 months after the streaming service launched on June 30 last year.”
“In 2016 alone, Spotify has added 12m subscribers at last count (28m > 40m) while Apple Music has added 10m (10m > 20m),” Ingham reports. “Seeing two services attract over 60m streaming subscribers between them is promising – especially when you consider that, at the end of 2014, the music business counted just 41m paying subs across all on-demand services globally (source: IFPI).”
“Apple’s latest update came amid the reveal of it ‘Best of 2016’ list, which highlights both editorial picks, as well as the top-selling + streamed Music, Apps, Games, TV shows, Movies, Books and Podcasts of the year,” Ingham reports. “You can check the full charts (and playlist) of Apple Music’s [Best of 2016] here.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s recent (and hopefully ongoing) expansion of student pricing (US$4.99/mo.) to more countries should help Apple Music, but as we wrote back in February on the occasion of Apple Music surpassing 11 million paying members:
Apple Music launched in over 100 countries. That’s an average of fewer than 110,000 subscribers per country since last June. Maybe there just aren’t that many true music lovers out there? It seems like most people are happy enough to be music dabblers for the price of free, even among well-heeled Apple users.
SEE ALSO:
Apple offers students half-price $4.99 Apple Music subscriptions starting today – May 6, 2016
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
Anemic. 3 years late. Awful UI. No student pricing out of the gate. Should be bundled with movies as we well. Considering 1 billion IOS devices in use.
Seriously!? Spotify has been around how long? 8 years. And on how many devices? Billions. And yet they’re only up to 60 million subscribers.
Must be the UI or lack of student priding out of the gate or that movies weren’t bundled? Right?
What it is, is that the desire for people to pay to stream music was overly exaggerated by the industry. A vast majority of people either want free streaming or to just buy and “own” their music. That’s why these numbers are low relative to availability.
I’m listening right now. “Old School Mix #3”:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/playlist/old-school-mix-3/idpl.3be7fabe63b14659844f22d5ca9d3855
I’ve been in this retro vibe for the past few months… A cornucopia of delights is AM.
Considering they have been pushing it at the detriment of user experience or quality, this comes as no surprise. Apple Music feels like a cheap hooker pushing herself to an uninterested customer.
Also, read between the lines – this comes in the middle of a misleading promotional effort pushing the 3 months trial, disguised as a yearly deal.
“Maybe there just aren’t that many true music lovers out there?” – That’s because Apple Music isn’t geared towards real music lovers, just towards consumers and consumption. The opposite of what music lovers are.
… not that MDN would know what true music love is….
“It seems like most people are happy enough to be music dabblers for the price of free, even among well-heeled Apple users” – see above.
3 months is enough to figure out that the product stinks, the user interface is cumbersome, and that there is no value in any of it.
20 million users out of how many iOS devices in use, with Apple pushing it at users at every opportunity?
Not a very good show. Probably because of the crappy interface, poor music discovery, and difficulty of users to manage playlists. All things that used to work well on iTunes before things started getting buried under store links.
+1
800 Million + iTunes Accounts. $3 Billion pissed away on a marketer of shitty headphones that had a Microsoft copying music rental service. About a year and a half of giving away 3 months to anybody who wants to listen to low quality streaming shit. And Apple announces 20 million music renters?
Epic fail. One can polish that turd with the most exquisite marketing bullshit Phil the Shill can come up with, but that is a failure.
In the meantime they have fucked up iTunes in some effort to get us to rent music we already own. No thank you, Pipeline Tim, Clueless Eddie Cue, Andre Romelle Young dba Dr Dre and other hangers on. People didn’t rent music from Rob Enderle or Steve Ballmer, either.
BTW, show of hands, how many actually listen to Beats One? About 3 1/2 years ago Apple could have owned Sirius XM for about $7 Billion and had a direct feed to customers with no middle man all over the US and a collection of stations already up and running, Not exactly sure why they passed on that golden opportunity.