Apple Music's subscribers include 6.5 million paid customers
We’ve been questioning for some time just how successfully Apple Music has been performing, and I predicted that Cupertino wouldn’t reveal those numbers until the next earnings call. Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s WSJDLive 2015 conference, though, Apple CEO Tim Cook finally spilled the beans.
The total count of current Apple Music users includes 15 million customers. That includes 6.5 million paid subscribers, and the remainder still on three-month trials. In August, Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue said the service had 11 million people on trial accounts, so The Wall Street Journal indicates those numbers suggest a 60 percent conversion rate of customers agreeing to pay up after their trials ended.
Those figures pale in comparison to Spotify, of course, which has 75 million active users. The rival streaming music service boasts 20 million paid subscribers. However, Spotify has been around since 2008, while Apple Music just launched on June 30, 2015.
Image credit: shinichiro.nakano on Instagram
According to Cook, consumers are responding very positively to one of the main features of Apple Music that distinguishes it from its rivals: the human curation of its playlists.
Apple Music’s first batch of customers came off the trial period at the end of September, and it’s definitely great news if The Wall Street Journal’s analysis of the numbers is correct at a 60 percent conversion rate. We already know that some customers have opted out of the streaming music service because of its initial bugs and problems, returning to rivals like Spotify and others, but it does seem like a good portion are sticking around.
You will find more statistics at Statista