Apple Music reaches 10 million subscribers in just six months, but Spotify still reigns supreme

Vaughn Highfield January 11, 2016

Since its launch in June 2015, Apple Music has racked up an impressive 10 million subscribers. To put that growth into context, it took the music streaming service Spotify six years to achieve those numbers.

Apple Music reaches 10 million subscribers in just six months, but Spotify still reigns supreme

As the Financial Times reported on Sunday, Apple Music’s milestone now places it firmly in second place behind Swedish streaming service Spotify – which has 20 million paid subscribers. Other services, such as Deezer and the Jay Z-owned Tidal lag well behind with 6.3 million and 1 million subscribers respectively.

While 10 million is a mightily impressive number of paid subscribers to have in a short amount of time, it’s hard to feel this is a mark of success for Apple.

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Not only did Spotify’s slow and troublesome growth to 10 million over the past six years lay much of the groundwork for Apple Music’s swift rise, in the same period of time Spotify also saw unprecedented growth. In 2014, Spotify hit 10 million paid users, and just a year later that had risen to 20 million – and that’s not including the 55 million “Free” tier users also bringing in revenue via ads.

Apple Music is also available in 100 territories to Spotify’s 58, and, as it comes pre-installed on every iPhone, Apple has an instant reach of over 800 million users. Of that, just over 1% have bothered to sign up and pay for the service. What’s more damning is how it had more subscribers during its trial period (11 million) than it does right now (10 million).

While it’s incredibly likely Apple Music will steal the top spot from Spotify in a year or two, it’s still unclear if Music will be an actual success, or if Apple is just playing the percentages game via its vast userbase.

Now read this: Apple Music vs. Spotify: Which music streaming service is best?