By Katie David A pple Music which began life as Beats Music in January 2014 under the watchful eye of talented music mogul Trent Reznor. Four months later Apple acquired Beats Music and the headphones arm of Beats Electronics in the company’s largest ever acquisition, costing some $3 billion.
Well that investment is paying off as Apple executive, Eddy Cue made the announcement at 27th Worldwide Developers Conference, which is Apple’s annual developers’ conference, during a keynote presentation, that Apple Music has now surpassed 15 million subscribers. What is so amazing about Apple milestone is how quickly Apple Music has managed to attract millions of users and capture market share in this segment. It was only in February of this year that Apple Music announced hitting 11 million subscribers.
To get a better understanding of Apple Music’s growth, lets look at one of their main competitors, Spotify, a music streaming service originally founded in 2006 in Sweden, took 6 years to hit 10 million paying users and now as of March 2016 had 30 million paying subscribers worldwide, up from 20 million paying sub- scribers in June 2015. Apple Music’s platform entered the music streaming market last year, and has managed to hit 15 million subscribers one year from launch and they are poised to revolutionise the streaming industry. But, how is Apple Music growing so quickly? Well, partly due to the fact that people associate Apple with quality products that hold value, both on the hardware and software side. That brand power and reputation is undoubtedly a key factor in the early success of the service, with heavy advertising and an integrated hardware and software advantage for Apple users.
At Apple Music’s current rate of users attraction they will surpass Spotify sometime in 2017, and that is sweet sounding music for Apple.
SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS • DECEMBER 2016 118
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