It’s been nearly a year since Apple services chief Eddy Cue said Apple Music had reached 60 million paid subscribers. Apple Music, which has no free tier beyond a 3-month trial period, last June had 60 million paid subscribers.
Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t regularly disclose Apple Music subscriptions, preferring only to give investors updates when the service hits certain milestones, but a new estimate from Counterpoint Research pegs Apple Music’s worldwide subscriber base at around 68 million at the end of 2019.
Rival Spotify reports user metrics every quarter because music streaming is its core business. The Swedish company finished 2019 with 124 million paid subscribers.
Last week, the market researcher released estimates on how the global music-streaming market grew last year. Total subscriptions jumped 32% to 358 million.
Translating those market shares into absolute numbers for companies that don’t disclose metrics directly, Apple Music finished the year with approximately 68 million paid subscribers, while Amazon had around 53.7 million. The e-commerce juggernaut said in January that Amazon Music had 55 million customers, but that figure includes ad-supported users in the free tier.
MacDailyNews Take: This is an estimate only, of course, but if it’s too low, perhaps it’ll prompt an official update from Apple at some point. 🤞🏻
Apple Music costs $4.99/mo. for students (which now comes with free access to Apple TV+), $9.99/mo.for individuals, and $14.99/mo. for the family plan.
Renting music may lead to the end of free over the air music stations.
If it does, it will result in:
1) rich people getting richer
2) commercials may Eventually become prevalent in music streams that you will be paying for via rent (subscription) fees.
3) Your monthly rent will always increase.
On another music note (no pun intended),one of my songs in my iTunes
Library all of a sudden sounded slightly different.
When I looked into this, i saw that the song I bought from Apple in 2007 by the original artist was replaced by a K-tell version in March 2020.
This has really eff’n made me mad.
Moral of story, all of you who purchased songs better rip them all to MP3’s and store them away from where apple can’t get to them.
I wonder if this kind of thing is going to occur more frequently in the future? It would be advantageous for music firms that rent music if it does because people like me who prefer original songs would have to pay a monthly fee to listen to original music if you could not purchase songs.
Also, when you purchase a song, you don’t have
to worry about your rent going up. Your subscription fees for streaming music will ALWAYS go up.