It took Apple Music six months to achieve what Spotify did in six years

Apple Music had a rough start, but now that the music streaming service has launched on all major platforms, and Apple has worked out most of the bugs, things are starting to look up. In fact, the service was able to exceed ten million paying subscribers in about six months, something that took Spotify about six years to achieve. That being said, music streaming wasn’t as popular at the time, and Apple Music had tons of muscle behind it, but it’s still an impressive achievement, one that may have some of the service’s naysayers thinking twice. 

According to the Financial Times, Apple has passed 10 million paying subscribers for Apple Music. Apple Music launched in June 2015 with a three month free trial. Since the launch, Apple announced it has 6.5 million paying subscribers in October. In November, Apple launched Apple Music on Android which no doubt attracted a significant chunk of additional new users. Crossing ten million is a significant symbolic milestone, as it now means Apple Music is half as large as Spotify’s paid userbase. The growth of Apple Music relative to Spotify is impressive; it took six years for Spotify to report 10 million paid subscribers. Apple Music has achieved that number in a little of six months. However, it is important to remember that much of Spotify’s business is derived from free users as most customers use the free ad-supported version. Apple has relied on numerous exclusives with artists to push its streaming music service to customers. Most recently, in December, Apple offered Taylor Swift’s 1989 World Tour video as a free perk for Apple Music members.