That’s up 2 million from the 11 million announced in February.
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The Apple Music numbers, however, show services are playing a more significant role in the company’s bottom line.
Apple Music faces stiff competition in the streaming music space from the likes of Spotify and newcomer Tidal, which has made news of late because of its exclusive rights to Prince’s streaming library. It took Spotify about six years to reach the 10 million mark, where Apple Music topped that in only ten months.
Apple Music now has 13 million subscribers.
Speaking of the Apple Watch and recently released iPhone SE, Cook said Watch sales had “met expectations and sold more than the iPhone had in its first 12 months”, while orders of the iPhone SE are supposedly creating a backlog due to high demand. Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) emergence with its Apple Music in 2015 has proved to be quite successful for the company.
Apple already had a large customer base to launch its music streaming service to, it will be interesting to see how many subscribers they have at the end of another twelve months.
Currently, Spotify continues to dominate the market as the most popular streaming platform, with 10 million new users each year. Spotify now boasts over 30 million paying subscribers and many more free users. Exclusive tracks from Taylor Swift’s albums, her World Tour video footage, and Drake’s assurance that his upcoming album will appear exclusively on Apple Music on Friday, has kept users excited.
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Apple launched its service at a time when the markets seemed matured enough and this not only applies to the USA but to markets like India as well. That said, if it becomes a trend that Apple’s hardware revenues continue to fall and service revenues continue rise, that could all change.
