Newsflash: Apple Music is not the failure that naysayers were rooting for it to become. Citing people familiar with the matter, The Financial Times newspaper reported today that Apple Music has passed ten million paying subscribers after just six months in existence.
If true, the service, which launched in more than a hundred countries in June of 2015, now has half as many paying customers as Spotify, which has been in the streaming-music game for years now.
At its current growth rate, Apple Music has “the potential to be the leading music subscription service sometime in 2017,” said Mark Mulligan, music industry analyst with Midia Research.
By comparison, Spotify had 20 million paying subscribers for its streaming music service as of June 2015.
Apple Music is free for first-time users during the first three months, after which customers can continue to use the service for a flat monthly fee of $9.99 per month, or $14.99 for a family of six.
One thing is certain: after Apple passes Spotify—and it’s a matter of “when”, not “if”—the music industry is going to experience an even sharper decline of downloads.
Source: The Financial Times