Spotify is accelerating away, although a more Apple-positive take on the situation is that it took Apple Music a year to reach the same subscribers total (15 million) that took Spotify just over six years to reach.
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After launching in Indonesia in March, Spotify is now present in 59 countries.
By hiring Troy Carter in June as its new global head of creator services, Spotify seemed to signal a willingness to accommodate some of the labels’ wishes.
Just days after Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) announced that it now has 17 million paying Apple Music subscribers, Spotify has chose to one-up the Mac maker.
The competition between the different music services has intensified in the past year since the launch of Jay Z’s Tidal app as well as Apple Music, with both platforms actively seeking artist “exclusives” in order to entice more users to their own service.
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The news about Apple Music was announced by CEO Tim Cook during the company’s event on September 7. “We’re not looking to acquire any streaming services”. However, what is notable from Ek’s numbers today is that Spotify appears to be growing faster than its well-heeled counterpart. The dominant on-demand music streaming platform has now announced that it has over 40 million paying subscribers, or more than twice the number of paid customers that Apple has. Considering the size of the market that Apple is targeting, 17 million is actually just a drop in the bucket. This flies in the face of conventional logic; many assumed that Apple Music, the streaming service that comes pre-installed (although not paid for, outside a free trial) on millions and millions of iPhones, would make up its starting line deficit easily. Spotify still faces a hard route to an IPO, and negotiations over royalty rates with major labels still pose a significant hurdle to reaching profitability. Apple has now redesigned the Apple Music interface in iOS 10, addressing one of the more prominent criticisms of the service since the initial design was confusing. Spotify, thus far, has refrained from entering the exclusives fray with Apple Music and Tidal, opting instead to wait out the exclusivity period for albums from Ocean, Drake, and Kanye West.
