While Spotify continues to be the number one choice for music streaming around the world, the gap between them and Apple Music looks to be narrowing pretty quickly.
In the US, Apple‘s music streaming service is growing at a faster rate when compared to the Swedish-based Spotify in terms of subscribers. The Wall Street Journal even reports that Apple Music may become the most popular choice as early as mid-2018, copping a 5 per cent growth in American subscribers each month, as opposed to Spotify’s 2 per cent in the region.
Apple also has four times as many users in the 30-day trial period than Spotify do.
But if we’re talking globally, Spotify still reign supreme, boasting a mammoth 70 million subscribers worldwide compared to Apple Music’s 36 million. Just how Tim Cook and his crew plan on closing that gap is yet to be seen, but they certainly have a ways to go.
Since the downfall of CDs and even the decline in downloads, streaming has emerged as the biggest revenue generator for the music industry. Streaming made up $US650 million in revenue back in 2011, but grew to an eye-watering $US3.93 billion in 2016.
That’s a shitload of scratch, but interestingly, streaming has never been a profitable venture. Spotify, which launched in 2008, has never reported a profit, but is still expected to launch its IPO “soon”. Other companies like Pandora have also found it difficult to make money.
It’s not known how Apple are going with their own streaming platform, as they usually like to shove all of their services – iCloud, App Store, Apple Pay, Apple Music, etc – under the same umbrella when reporting on earnings. The last report showed an 18 per cent growth on the previous year to $US8.47 billion.
Apple has somehow managed to become an insane force in most aspects of the tech world, so what makes music streaming any different? They’ll probably come on top eventually.
