Did Apple wait too long to enter the music streaming market?

When it comes to new markets and technologies, Apple generally likes to take things slow. Before entering new territory, the company makes sure that what it’s getting into isn’t just a fad, and it watches its potential competitors to see what works and what doesn’t. This strategy has proven successful in the past, but it may have also crippled Apple’s chances of becoming a serious competitor in the music streaming market. To be fair, Apple Music is more popular than most music streaming services, but it lags far, far behind the likes of Spotify and Pandora, due in large part to the fact that they’ve spent years gathering a dedicated userbase, while Apple Music only launched just recently. 

By now, we’re used to Apple being late to the party. The company has a long standing reputation for taking a wait-and-see approach with new technologies before releasing its own version and touting it as the best. It took Apple over two years to make the bigger iPhone 6 Plus after Samsung found success with its Galaxy Note line of smartphones, and three years to build the iPad Pro, its competitor to the Microsoft Surface. Most famously, it kept 3G out of the original iPhone, waiting until the technology had stabilized and become more widespread. With the iPhone 6 Plus, Apple’s strategy worked flawlessly, reaching the public at the precipice of big phone hype. Early reports indicate the iPad Pro may help boost the declining sales of Apple’s tablet over the holiday season, but the full picture hasn’t formed yet. It seems like a smart strategy, but when it comes to music streaming, it is looking like Apple waited too long to get into the game. As of October, Apple Music has 6.5 million paid users, which is a great number for paying subscribers for such a young service. But Apple Music’s biggest problem is and will continue to be that millions and millions of people stream music for free from other services, and have little incentive to switch to a paid music service.