Spotify Reaches Over 40 Million Paying Subscribers, Continues to Outpace Apple Music
Spotify has announced that it now has over 40 million paying subscribers as of this month, meaning that it has added some 10 million subscribers since March. Spotify remains the most popular streaming music service worldwide, and its new subscriber growth continues to outpace its biggest rival, Apple Music.
Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek hinted about the milestone in a tweet earlier today:
Apple Music has been growing at a pace of about 2 million new subscribers every two months:
11 million in February,
13 million in April,
15 million in June, and
17 million in early September. Spotify's figures, meanwhile, show it grew at a pace of over 3 million new subscribers every two months between March and September.
Earlier this year, Spotify vice president Jonathan Forster said Apple Music is "raising the profile of streaming," which has helped, not hurt, its business.
"It's great that Apple is in the game. They are definitely raising the profile of streaming. It is hard to build an industry on your own," said Forster. "Since Apple Music started we've been growing quicker and adding more users than before."
Spotify may benefit from Apple, but its relationship with the iPhone maker is not perfect. The two companies were recently embroiled in a major dispute after Apple rejected a version of the Spotify app that replaced the option to purchase a subscription via in-app purchase with an external sign-up function.
At the time, Spotify accused Apple of using the App Store approval process as a "weapon to harm competitors," to which Apple responded that Spotify is "publicly resorting to rumors and half-truths" about the App Store and "asking for exemptions to the rules we apply to all developers."
Spotify has remained competitive by matching Apple Music's $14.99 family plan in June and introducing new features such as Release Radar.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Top Rated Comments