In the latest news, the Cupertino giant Apple has released the Apple Music subscription numbers since its inception. In a time frame of 18 months, the company has managed to gain 20 million paid subscribers. It was 11 million earlier this February.
Also, the company announced that 60% of customers using Apple Music have not bought content from the iTunes Store in the last 1 year. As per Eddy Cue, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Internet software and products, 50 percent of Apple Music subscribers live outside of the U.S, such as Canada, China, South Africa, Japan, Russia, Brazil, and India.
In an interview with Billboard, Eddy Cue said:
It’s been quite a year. We were thrilled to see that we could take [artists’] passions and drive them all the way to No. 1. Chance the Rapper, who we put on Apple Music exclusively, hit the top 10 on the Billboard charts [based on streams alone], and I can’t recall that being done before.
They work really well for everybody concerned — they’re great for the label, they work for the artist and for us. But an across-the-board Apple policy concerning such promotions doesn’t exist. It’s really about launching things. Sometimes it makes sense to do that.
We’ve always thought that hip-hop was underrepresented both in iTunes and in the streaming chart. And more people listen to hip-hop now than ever before so we’ve done a lot of work in that area.
We can’t forget that, as an industry, we still have very few music subscribers. There are billions of people listening to music and we haven’t even hit 100 million subscribers. There’s a lot of growth opportunity.