“In a wide-ranging interview, Apple CEO Tim Cook divulged Apple Music subscriber numbers, and said that a strong push into television and movies is underway,” Mike Wuerthele reports for AppleInsider.
“In an appearance on Bloomberg Television on The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations, Cook was forthcoming about paid versus trial Apple Music subscribers,” Wuerthele reports. “He said that in total, the service has more than 50 million users between paid members and trials, in contrast to the 40 million paid subscribers the company declared in April.”
“Looking at Apple’s growth numbers, the company appears to be posting about 4 million conversions a month to a paid subscription[s],” Wuerthele reports. “While the push into content isn’t a secret, the interview was the first time that Cook directly addressed the effort. ‘We are very interested in the content business. We will be playing in a way that is consistent with our brand,’ Cook told Bloomberg. ‘We’re not ready to give any details on it yet. But it’s clearly an area of interest.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Inexorably, Apple Music proceeds to No.1, relegating Spotify to also-ran status.
Let’s wait to see where Spotify is in 36 months, shall we? — MacDailyNews, April 18, 2018
SEE ALSO:
Analyst: Apple Music will average 40% annual growth over the next three years – April 18, 2018
Apple Music hits 40 million paid subscribers milestone – April 4, 2018
Apple Music hits 38 million paid subscribers – March 12, 2018
Apple Music expands student membership pricing to 82 new countries – February 13, 2018
Apple Music poised to knock off Spotify – February 12, 2018
Apple Music was always going to win – February 6, 2018
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
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
Nothing wrong with organic ambition, however Apple needs to fix and polish its basics which is hardware and software first. Doing movies and credit cards can come later
Maybe, just maybe, the Mac hardware people are not the same people as the software engineers creating Apple Pay and therefore it’s not a case of favouring one at the expense of the other.
Maybe it’s the leadership that can’t handle working on two projects at once? There has to be some way to explain Apple’s incompetence when it comes to updating their hardware.
Have you noticed how chatty Tim Cook is about future plans and how wordy he is? By this method, he’s communicating with investors and tamping down any possible positive surprises, hence excitement and delight, about the company. So he’s projecting himself into media as if he were a typical droning CEO of a dour corporation.
Maybe they should fix iTunes first. Give us a separate Mac OS App for Apple Music and podcasts, slim iTunes down from the bloatware they’ve created. An Apple Music app for IOS similar to Spotify.
Apple Music as a replacement for iTunes is an abject failure.
At the time Apple pissed away almost $3 Billion on Beats- maker of shiteous headphones and a me too rental music service- iTunes had well over 800 Million accounts. To have only converted 50 million accounts after years of giving away a trial to anyone with a pulse is an embarrassment, at minimum. Calling it a successs is putting lipstick on a pig as less than 10% of people with an iTunes account see it as worthwhile.
The baseline of comparison is not what Spotify or Pandora have- it is the 800 million iTunes accounts. 750 million of us have chosen to either stay with iTunes or switched to other services.
The truth of the matter is that the younger demographics have abandoned buying physical media and apparently paid subscription services. Most performers make bank on live performance- not sales or rental of recordings, which is an inversion of the old model.
When you have over a billion iOS devices and gawd only knows how many millions of Macs is service and you only have 50 million customers after years of effort and billions invested, that is, at best, a very marginal business.
Apple’s stubborn refusal to offer lossless tracks through iTunes has opened up a market for companies like HD Tracks, where you get a choice of DRM free lossless formats. People who listen to something other than CHR and Urban formats want something better than. 224 lossy format.
“When you have over a billion iOS devices and gawd only knows how many millions of Macs is service and you only have 50 million customers after years of effort and billions invested, that is, at best, a very marginal business.”
Yup, epic failure.
“People who listen to something other than CHR and Urban formats want something better than. 224 lossy format.”
Trying to understand and follow you DG, please explain for the clueless non-audiophiles such as myself …
Apple, Music Labels and the media are pushing subscription streaming as the customer preferred replacement for the sale of physical media or digital downloads. The numbers of subscriptions would suggest otherwise.
If you had a business and started offering a new product that was designed to replace an existing line, yet the new product retained less than 10% of the old one, would you call that a success? That is my posit- it is not about being an audiophile.
“If you had a business and started offering a new product that was designed to replace an existing line, yet the new product retained less than 10% of the old one, would you call that a success?”
Of course not. But I still don’t understand what is missing? Part of my ignorance is I don’t understand the digital audio file formats. Thanks for the reply.
I would prefer if Apple recommitted itself to the core of Apple’s beginning and made, year after year, the baddest and most powerful computers of ALL TIME. Not interested in this sideshow celebrity nonsense …