“According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple Music is about to overtake Spotify as the most popular streaming music service in the United States,” Adam Clark Estes writes for Gizmodo. “Apple Music is adding new US subscribers at a monthly growth rate of 5 percent, while Spotify trails at 2 percent. It doesn’t take much math to realize that Apple poses a real threat to Spotify at something that Spotify essentially invented ten years ago.”
“As many suspected when it launched three years ago, Apple Music was bound to succeed simply because Apple is big enough and rich enough to will it so,” Estes writes. “Apple unveiled Apple Music in 2015 — which was really just a rebranded version of Beats Music, part of Apple’s $3 billion acquisition of Beats. It was clear how the new service would succeed. Because Apple could preload the service on iPhones, Watches, and Macs, the company could effectively tap into a new revenue stream without actually inventing anything.”
“If the Journal’s numbers are correct and the trends continue, Spotify might cease to be synonymous with streaming music,” Estes writes. “It looks like Apple will win again—not because the underdog can’t hack it but because money can buy success.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: You’d have to be stupid to subscribe to Spotify when it has 33% fewer tracks than Apple Music for the same price. Apple Music boasts a catalog of 45 million songs; Spotify has a mere subset of just 30 million.
Don’t be stupid. If you’re still subscribing to Spotify, it’s past time for you to cancel it and upgrade to Apple Music. (See also: How to move your Spotify playlists to Apple Music.)
And, yes, Apple was always going to beat the likes of Spotify, Pandora, etc.
Simple mathematics makes it blatantly obvious what’s going to happen to Pandora. — MacDailyNews, September 24, 2013
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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. — MacDailyNews, June 9, 2015
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Spotify is a poor man’s Apple Music. The demographics in this race, as ever, greatly favor Apple in the long run. — MacDailyNews, January 3, 2018
SEE ALSO:
Apple Music on track to overtake Spotify, become No. 1 streaming service in U.S. this summer – February 4, 2018
Apple Music and Spotify now account for the majority of music consumption in the UK – January 3, 2018
Spotify files for its IPO – January 3, 2018
Spotify hit with $1.6 billion lawsuit from music publisher – January 2, 2018
Watch out Spotify and Apple Music, here comes Amazon – December 18, 2017
Spotify leads call for investigation into ‘troubling’ Apple and Google app store practices – May 5, 2017
Apple Music passes Pandora and Spotify in mobile usage – March 29, 2017
Spotify hits 50 million paid subscribers – March 3, 2017
Apple Music surpasses 20 million paid members 17 months after launch – December 6, 2016
Oh ok, Spotify listeners are upgrading to Apple Music – July 19, 2015
Spotify CEO claims to be ‘ok’ with Apple Music – June 9, 2015