Apple Music hits 60m subscribers globally

Apple Music now has 60 million subscribers around the world.

Eddy Cue, its SVP of services, made the claim overnight in an interview with French media website Numerama while discussing the company’s direction after sunsetting iTunes.

The figure includes free trialists who get the chance to try out the service for three months before the monthly fees kick in.

He also confirmed that Apple’s digital radio station Beats 1 now has “tens of millions of listeners”.

“In the Apple ecosystem, Apple Music is the number one streaming service,” Cue said.

Apple Music’s last subscriber update was in December when it was 56 million, including free trialists, according to the Financial Times.

Doing the numbers, that means it’s taken just six months to add four million new payees.

Apple Music is still catching up with Spotify, which in April this year claimed 100 million subscribers. In April/May 2018, Spotify was at the 75 million mark and Apple Music was at 50 million.

More recent figures have Amazon Music at about 30 million and Google/Alphabet (which includes YouTube and Google Play) at 15 million.

Apple Music’s growth this year has come from its slashing prices in India, offering free music streaming with American Airlines, and by bringing in in Shazam users (which it now owns) with free Apple Music trials after the Grammy awards.

Spotify has also continued to partner with various companies to bundle its service, including The New York Times, Hulu, Samsung, and Starbucks.

Cue told Numerama, “Of course I’m fond of iTunes, but I think Apple Music is absolutely better in every way.

“We have something better now and there’s no point in looking back. Contrary to what the press may have reported, purchases and other iTunes playlists are being entirely transferred into the new application.

“Nothing will be lost from the pre-streaming era.”

Cue also emphasised that his company would not follow Spotify’s shift to podcasting.

“These are two different things,” he pointed out. “You don’t listen to a podcast, then listen to a piece of music, and then listen to a podcast.

“And experience has shown us that running music and podcasts in separate applications works great on iOS.”