Apple’s streaming music service hits 38M paid subscribers
san francisco — Apple’s streaming music service now has 38 million paid subscribers, up from 36 million in February, the company said.
Apple is locked in race for subscribers with Amazon.com, Alphabet’s Google and others as streaming music becomes the dominant form of paid music consumption. Apple’s number compares to 71 million premium subscribers at the end of 2017 at industry leader Spotify, which plans to list shares in the coming weeks on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol SPOT.
Apple said Eddy Cue, senior vice-president of internet software and services, disclosed the most recent subscriber number for Apple Music at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.
Amazon Music Unlimited has 16 million paying subscribers, and Pandora Media Inc has 5.48 million total subscribers. Google does not release paid subscriber numbers for its service, Google Play Music.
Apple, Spotify, Google and other services charge $9.99 a month for music. Amazon offers its service to members who already pay for its Prime membership, which includes shipping, video content and other benefits, for $7.99 per month.
In addition to its paid service, Spotify also offers an free ad-supported version to help draw users into the service. Apple Music does not offer an ad-based version and instead uses a three-month free trial to lure customers. Cue said Apple has 8 million subscribers currently in the free trial period, the first time Apple has disclosed the number of trial users. Apple has bought digital magazine distributor Texture to extend its subscription services beyond music and online storage.
The deal announced on Monday puts Apple in control of a service often described as a Netflix of magazines. Texture allows readers to pore over articles in more than 200 magazines for $10 per month, much like Netflix sells unlimited access to its video programming.
But Texture hasn’t proven as popular as Netflix, which boasts 55 million subscribers in the US alone. Texture hasn’t specified how many subscribers it has, but CEO John Loughlin said in a 2016 interview that the number ranged in the “hundreds of thousands.”
Apple didn’t disclose how much it paid for Texture, which had raised at least $90 million since it was founded nearly a decade ago as Next Issue. The magazine distributor had been owned by investors that included Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, Rogers Media and KKR. — Reuters, AP