Six weeks after the launch of Apple Music, the first figures concerning the rate of adoption of the new service are beginning to emerge.
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The story behind the story: Digital Music News sees an invisible hand in all of this, quietly twisting Spotify’s arm.
Apple Music rolled out with a three-month free trial period on June 30.
One analyst said that although the service has found a following, he would have expected Apple to attract more trial members given the hundreds of millions of people who already have credit cards on file with the company through its iTunes service.
With that being said, Spotify announced that it would be launching two new offers called the Spotify Family offer and the PlayStation offer, where users can play music directly from their console. What Apple understands keenly – for all its anti-freemium vitriol – is that prolonged free, and near free, access is key to driving subscription. Competing services have complained this policy forces them to charge more or sacrifice profits.
In April we posted a report titled “European Regulators Sticking their Nose into Apple’s Streaming Music Business before it even gets off the Ground”. Just days after Apple Music launched, tutorials sprang up all over the Web with tips on how to cancel.
The probe examined whether the music industry executives and Apple were working to stifle free offerings from services like Spotify, which uses its ad-supported service to entice listeners to buy a subscription.
The good news for Apple this morning is that European Commission investigators appear to be closing their examination of whether major labels colluded with the company to penalise competitors like Spotify.
The last we heard, Spotify had more than 75 million users but only 20 to 30 million are believed to have paid subscriptions.
To date, the app has rarely closed off content to free users.
What may seem unimaginable to anyone below the age of 18, but at one point if you wanted to listen to an album, you’d have to go out and buy the thing.
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Separately, europe has inquired SPOTIFY along with other song instant watch assistance for the required information relating APPLE’s portable App Store.
