It wasn’t that long ago that the sense and nonsense of a streaming provider was discussed, sometimes very controversially, on the Internet. Likewise, voices were raised critical or in favor of paying artists who offer their titles through these services. There were also very lengthy discussions about it at Apfeltalk.
In this context, many will certainly remember the name Taylor Swift, who at the time was very critical of streaming services, especially Spotify, and demonstratively did not want to see her music distributed through them. However, shortly afterwards it became the figurehead of Apple Music.
Competition stimulates the market
However, this is not about the concerns of individual pop stars, but about the impressive idea that competition can certainly stimulate the market. For a long time, Spotify was the only serious provider in this field in Germany, and yet it had to struggle with rather poor subscription numbers and little economic success.
The launch of Apple Music shifted the existing discussions about poor artist pay a bit to the technical area, as the service was slow to make its advertised integration with the services already in place like iTunes and iTunes Match, but the launch of Apple Music made a difference that many more people were now dealing with the topic of music streaming and were willing to use such a service. Spotify also benefited from this. Not least because interested parties could fall back on an existing and tried-and-tested platform.
The offers and the payment structures of Apple Music and Spotify are almost identical, whereby Telekom customers with Spotify have a considerable advantage over Apple Music, since the volume used via the service is not charged to them if they also book the service as part of their mobile phone contract.
Spotify now has 30 million paying customers
In an interview with Reuters, Spotify’s European boss and Vice President Jonathan Forster recently highlighted the positive effect of Apple Music on its own streaming service: “Since Apple Music started, we’ve been growing faster and adding more users than before.”
And indeed, Spotify now has 30 million paying subscribers and, according to the deputy, 10 million new subscribers are added every year.
However, through constant further development of its app and the addition of new functions, the provider has also shown that the market launch of Apple Music also represented an opportunity from the outset to make music streaming better known. As can now be seen, Apple Music helped with its powerful marketing machine.