It’s only been a little over six months since Apple started operations at Apple Music, and in that short span of time, this promising service has outdone expectations, as well as the previous market leader, Spotify. Apple Music now has over 11 million subscribers, along with 782 million iCloud users.
The new 11 million figure was mentioned by Craig Federighi and Eddy Cue, Apple’s Senior Vice Presidents, on John Gruber’s podcast, The Talk Show, published today. It should be noted at this point that it took Spotify, its main rival, 6 long years to reach its first 10 million milestone.
This is an interesting piece of information because Apple’s streaming service had faced a lot of flak at its launch owing to its bug ridden, and clustered interface. It was only after iOS 9 came in that many of these issues were cleared.
However, Apple Music is not where it ends for the Cupertino tech-giant. “Apple Video” is something else the company has up its sleeve. It’s the next big Apple project with many partners involved, such as ABC, CBS, and Fox. Apple already has a large library of movies and video on its iTunes Store, which can currently be only bought or rented.
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 has increased more than 50 per cent, with 317 billion songs being streamed last year.
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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