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Business News Digital
Apple Music has 6.5 million paying subscribers
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 20 October 2015
Apple Music now has 6.5 million paying subscribers, according to the tech giant’s chief exec Tim Cook, who got busy chatting about his firm’s streaming music platform during a wide-ranging conversation at a conference in California yesterday. An additional 8.5 million are still enjoying the service for free, their three month trials yet to expire.
“We have music experts, just like the DJ when we were growing up”, Cook said, while trying, with limited success, to distinguish his streaming set-up from the competition. “It gives you a feeling that there are no words in my vocabulary to describe… it brings the art back in music. I’m finding personally that I’m now discovering a whole lot of music that I wasn’t listening to before”. So at least Cook is enjoying the Apple Music experience.
Those who signed up for Apple’s streaming service on day one back on 30 Jun saw their three month free trial expire at the start of the month of course, and there has been much speculation in music circles as to how many people would continue to use the set-up once they had to pay ten pounds a month for it. Unlike Spotify, Apple only offers radio channels for free beyond the trial period.
Back in early August, Apple’s Eddy Cue said eleven million people had signed up for his firm’s streaming service, though some of those could still be in their free trial period now, so that doesn’t necessarily mean 4.5 million have definitely dropped off already.
But even if they have, if Apple can turn over half of all those who give the free trial a whirl into paying customers, then that would be a pretty decent return, though it remains to be seen what free trial and premium sign ups look like as the whole venture matures.
Meanwhile, those figures mean that Spotify remains the big guy in paid-for streaming, for now at least, and it may well stay that way until Apple – or someone else – persuades the music companies to let them launch a mid-market paid-for streaming service priced at a few pounds per month. Unless you’re of the opinion Amazon has already done that with Prime.