Eddy Cue gave the first real sign of how well Apple’s streaming music service is doing since its launch at the end of June.
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Users will have to pay $9.99 per month for individual access to 30 million songs, human-curation playlists and a live radio station. Apple’s subscribers are all in a three month free trial phase so that number could drop dramatically, but Apple is hoping it’ll go up instead.
Because of this auto-renewal system, Apple Music may lock some users into subscribing, but there have already been complaints that the streaming service is not performing up to par.
Signing up 11 million people to a free trial is a decent effort, and a combination of Apple’s brand prestige, coupled with a strong novelty factor has helped with the growth.
“We all know one thing, we all have different television delivery systems, don’t we all wish that the delivery systems were better, as far as curation and service?” he says. In reality, the confusing nature of Apple’s service is winning over few people, with Jim Dalrymple of the influential Apple blog, The Loop, summing up Apple Music as “nothing short of a mind-blowing exercise in frustration”. It could well be the case that many thousands choose not to pay once the free service ends.
If Apple does manage to mirror the Spotify conversion rate, it still won’t make much of a difference to the firm’s bottom line.
It looks like that issue didn’t stop many from signing up though. Assuming Apple is able to convert all of those trial memberships into regular paying customers in October.
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Meanwhile, according to Cue, Apple’s App Store in July raked in a monthly record $1.7 billion in revenue. Apple has given out $33 billion to developers of App Store, since its launch in 2008, Cue said in relation to Apple’s digital product services. It’s probably safe to assume, though, that some of those family plan buyers will stick with it. (Who would pick the more expensive option if they just wanted to try Apple Music for a little bit and quit?).
