Oh Apple Music, you came in with the best intentions and a very generous free trial period. But alas, despite your generosity and features, people just aren’t hooked. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently revealed that Apple Music currently has 6.5M paying subscribers. For comparison, Spotify has 20M paid subscriptions. Granted, Apple Music is a much younger service and needs some time to catch up.
Back in August, Apple was over the moon that 11M people had signed up for the three month free trial of Apple Music. But about 40 percent of people didn’t stick around after their trial expired, leaving 60 percent maintaining the service. Currently 8.5M people are testing out the free trial, so for Apple’s sake we hope at least 40 percent of that group stick around once money gets involved.
We tried out Apple Music and the common consensus was that it just wasn’t worth switching from Spotify. They’re both $9.99/month with 30 million (give or take) songs available, radio functions, and playlists. The big difference seems to be that Apple Music features more in the radio department: weekly radio shows from some select major artists and Beats 1, a 24-hour live radio station broadcasting from LA, New York, and London. Spotify’s main stand-out features are its Running mode and the Discover Weekly playlist that aims to find new music that it thinks you’ll enjoy, updated every Monday.
We don’t mean to hate on Apple Music, it just wasn’t the service for us. It turns out that neither Spotify nor Apple Music is the leader in music streaming, anyway. They both have to catch up to Prime Music (a part of Amazon Prime’s services.)
Do you have a subscription to Spotify or Apple Music? Why do you prefer one service over the other?
Important things happen in Pacific Northwest nightlife, and DMNW will send you alerts!
