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Spotify Reaches Over 40 Million Paying Subscribers, Continues to Outpace Apple Music

Wednesday September 14, 2016 8:29 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
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-Apple-Music-logos
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.

Tags: Spotify, Apple Music Guide
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GreyOS
38 months ago

With the new improved Apple Music UI, can't think of one advantage of using Spotify

let me know when apple music can do this

Rating: 44 Votes
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studio¹³¹
38 months ago

With the new improved Apple Music UI, can't think of one advantage of using Spotify


The new UI blows.
Rating: 25 Votes
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Kaspersky
38 months ago
Don't know how a European company can compete with Apple... it's not like Apple is paying any tax there
Rating: 21 Votes
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RedOrchestra
38 months ago
Ya' gotta' love competition - go get 'em Spotify.
Rating: 17 Votes
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taptic
38 months ago
Discover Weekly FTW.
Rating: 17 Votes
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Aluminum213
38 months ago
With the new improved Apple Music UI, can't think of one advantage of using Spotify
Rating: 13 Votes
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LordVic
38 months ago

How much newer is Apple Music....? I'm willing to bet Spotify didn't have 17 million paying subscribers after 18 months.

Apple also have the benefit of being able to make Apple music the default music and media player on every iPhone that can run it.

When any user buys an iPhone, right there on their homescreen, by default is Apple music. you only have to press it, and then sign up, and you're set to go.

for Spotify, GPM, Tidal, etc, there's no free marketing here like Apple can have. A user must actively know what these services are, and purposefully go to the app store, download the app, and in some cases, then go to a website to sign up.

this is very similar to the situation thta happened back in the 90's with Microsoft. Where they used their own OS as a springboard for internet explorer. Every Windows device came with IE pre-installed as the default Web Browser, which in turn, inflated IE's usage cases over competition, and could be argued, was one of the reasons Netscape was driven out of business. The behaviour was seen so unfavourably that the EU fined Microsoft and forced Microsoft to provide a menu by default giving options for competiting browsers.

I'm not saying Apple is a monopoly in the smartphone, so there's really no Anti-Trust case. But the behaviour is the same.
Rating: 11 Votes
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taptic
38 months ago

How much newer is Apple Music....? I'm willing to bet Spotify didn't have 17 million paying subscribers after 18 months.


and why would anyone expect it? They're a music service whereas Apple could throw any useless service onto millions of iOS devices and have millions of people using it within a week. They have the ability to push it to people in mass.

I'm honestly surprised how much people are defending Apple Music as the clear winner. Have any of you actually used Spotify?
Rating: 9 Votes
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tw1ll
38 months ago
Spotify = pay money & listen to what you want on any device - no messing with your own libraries. Apple Music has that whole "your library will live in the cloud" feature which I have never fully "got" and more to the point I don't want a streaming music service to go anywhere near ANY file on my own hardware. Maybe that's part of the problem with Apple music - too messy a proposition and they don't make it clear up-front if there is an option to keep the app away from locally stored files. If I have got the wrong end of the stick then it just reinforces that their marketing is confusing.
Rating: 8 Votes
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MLMcMillion
38 months ago
Still using Apple Music because it actually lets me sync local music. That *never* once worked in Spotify.
Rating: 7 Votes

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