Apple Music reaches 11m users, Iovine states Spotify is not a direct competitor
Another day, another set of news on Apple Music. Eddy Cue revealed - in the first official announcement on the service’s numbers - that Apple Music attracted eleven million users to date, who are enjoying the three-month trial period offered by Apple.
Of these, nine million signed up to the individual plan which costs $9.99 per month, whilst two million opted for the family plan at $14.99, which enables up to six family members to use the service.
Eddy Cue revealed to USA Today that he is thrilled with the numbers, and in fact if all of Apple Music’s trial users stuck around after the free trial, it would make the service the second biggest after Spotify, eclipsing the user bases of Deezer, Rhapsody, Rdio and Tidal.
On the other hand, that’s a really big ‘if’, since there may be a lot of people who signed up out of curiosity but would not be prepared to spend $120 per year on a music service. Also, given the hundreds of millions of active iTunes account in the world, it will be interesting to see how Apple plans to increase the percentage of those users who are willing to give Apple Music a go.
But what about the competition? In an interview published by the Evening Standard yesterday with Apple Music executive Jimmy Iovine, he stated that he does not think of Spotify, Rdio or Tidal as direct competitors, and that he looks at other forms of entertainment as the competitor.
Iovine stated, in regards to the competitors-that-are-not-really-competitors: “Music deserves elegance and the distribution right now is not great. It’s all over the place and there are a bunch of utilities. That’s the best you can find. It’s basically a really narrow, small, inelegant way to have music delivered. So it’s sterile, programmed by algorithms and numbing.”
Ouch.
The statements show that Apple is trying to distance itself from everyone else, however the company is offering a service that - in spite of some differences in the way it approaches curation - is not that dissimilar to Spotify, Deezer or Tidal.
Apple however has a huge marketing budget - a worldwide campaign to promote Apple Music is underway - one that cannot be matched by any of the other services save perhaps Google (if Music Key is ever to come out of beta).
11 million users in five weeks is an impressive number, and by the end of 2015 Apple Music could easily be the largest streaming music service in the world.
(Andrea Leonelli)