It’s only been six months since Apple started operations at Apple Music, and in that short span of time, this promising service has outdone market expectations, and already managed to reach half the number of paid subscribers that the market leader, Spotify has. Noteworthy is the fact, that it took Spotify, its main rival, 6 long years to reach this milestone of 10 million subscribers.
What makes this feat even more impressive, is the fact that Apple’s streaming service which because of it’s bug ridden, and clustered interface met with a lot of criticism at its launch. It was only after iOS 9 came in that many of these issues were cleared.
This growth of Apple’s premium music streaming service, which launched in more than 100 countries, not only raises the competition in the music streaming service space, but more importantly raises hopes for the future of the music Industry itself, which has been fighting a losing battle against Piracy for the last decade or so.
Deciphering this music industry analyst, Mark Mulligan had this to say,“It’s good news that Apple is making streaming work but it is also going to accelerate the decline of downloads.” Apple is rapidly gaining on Spotify and at its current growth rate has “the potential to be the leading music subscription service sometime in 2017.”
Streaming is slowly becoming the preferred form of consumption of music, and is growing rapidly as people give up on downloads. In the US, demand for streaming increased more than 50 per cent, with 164bn songs streamed in total.
Apple despite all of this has a long way to go before it comes close to overtaking Spotify. Spotify last reported its number of subscribers in June, and it is expected to have grown substantially since then. Back then it had 20 million paid members, and in total it reported 75 million users.
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