Apple has announced its first Apple Music subscriber numbers, via an article in USA Today: After a month, 11 million people have signed up for trial memberships, with 2 million of those choosing Apple’s more expensive family plan for multiple users.
Apple $AAPL has announced its first Apple Music subscriber numbers, via an article in USA Today: After a month, 11 million people have signed up for trial memberships, with 2 million of those choosing Apple’s more expensive family plan for multiple users.
There are two ways to look at that:
Join 500,000+ readers who start their day with Quartz.
By subscribing, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
Will Apple eventually grow larger than Spotify? It’s possible, but it’s not happening yet.
“Assuming all the trial memberships are converted into paying customers come October,” USA Today’s Marco della Cava writes, “Apple would already boast half the paid memberships of reigning streaming champ Spotify.” But that is a terrible assumption to make. Most people don’t pay for Spotify or other streaming music services for a reason—they don’t want to pay for music. So it’s simply not clear yet how many paying subscribers Apple will have after its trial period.
Longer-term, assuming Apple continues to make improvements to Apple Music, and does a good job marketing the benefits of a streaming subscription, it’s conceivable that it will grow larger than Spotify. But you can’t really base Apple’s growth trajectory—for better or worse–on one month of trial data.
