Apple Music just posted its “best quarter ever”

“We had our best quarter ever for the App Store and Apple Music,” Tim Cook said in an earnings call with investors after the release of financials for its Q2.

Apple’s revenue in the three months ending on March 31 was US $58 billion, which was 5% down from Q2 2018 as iPhone numbers remained lacklustre.

International sales constituted 61% and of these Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) dropped.

However its services division – which includes Apple Music – showed a 16.2% increase to a record $11.45 billion and beat Wall Street’s expectations.

It accounted for 20% of the March quarter revenue and about one-third of its gross profit dollars.

Services also include Apple TV, Apple Pay and AppleCare.

For Q1 and Q2, the division enjoyed a 17.6% year-on-year growth to $22.33 billion.

After Spotify earlier in the week announced it reached 100 million subscribers, it was expected Apple would shed new light on the number of payers for its music streaming service.

But the Cupertino, California-based tech giant confined itself to revealing it had 390 million subscribers across all divisions (an increase of 30 million in the last quarter alone, Cook said) and expects the figure to exceed 0.5 billion during 2020.

The last subscriber figure for Apple Music, in late January, was 56 million.

Cook stated: “Our March quarter results show the continued strength of our installed base of over 1.4 billion active devices, as we set an all-time record for services, and the strong momentum of our wearables, home and accessories category, which set a new March quarter record.

“We delivered our strongest iPad growth in six years, and we are as excited as ever about our pipeline of innovative hardware, software and services.”

In the product category, which dropped 9% year-on-year Apple sold $31 billion worth of iPhones and 5.5 billion in Macs. Both were less than expected.

However, it generated $4.9 billion in iPads and $5.1 billion in wearables, both of which exceeded forecasts.

In fact, iPads had their best growth rate in six years.

The company also seemed happy with the sales for the second-generation AirPods earbuds introduced in March.