This month, music streaming services accumulated more than 100 million paid subscribers, with Spotify leading the chart by a large amount. Sirius XM is the closest to Spotify with 9 million subscribers less, and Apple Music is the third, with less than half of what Spotify has.
During its big event last Wednesday, Apple proudly announced that its streaming service, Apple Music, now has 17 million paying subscribers. It’s not as much as Spotify’s 39 million paid subscribers, but it’s an impressive amount considering the short time Apple Music has been around. Apple says that 1 million subscribers join the platform each month, so the numbers are only going up with time.
Sirius XM radio has been steadily growing its streaming radio subscriber count, boasting 30.6 million paying subscribers in a quarterly announcement recently.
Deezer, Pandora, Tidal and Rhapsody are far behind the three leading giants, but they still have between 3 and 6 million subscribers each. SoundCloud Go and YouTube Red have not shared their numbers, but they probably don’t rack up as many subscribers as the other services yet.
In total, the paying subscriber count of the music streaming services mentioned above add up to 103.1 million. That is a large milestone for the music business, and it doesn’t seem it’s going to stop growing anytime soon. Of course we are not counting the millions of users who use the free version of the streaming services. Spotify alone has over 60 million non-paying subscribers, which tells us music streaming is becoming the go-to service for listening to music.
With the numbers growing so quickly we can only expect the industry to hit the next big milestone sooner rather than later. In an interview made by Digital Music News, experts calculate that the number of paid subscribers will reach 500 million as soon as 2019.
In the last few years, paid subscribers have been growing slowly but steadily as new music-streaming services have appeared and people have been adopting this new way of listening to music. However, as the years pass, music-streaming will become the standard, it will become much more accesible and people will start to get comfortable with it, leading to an exponential growth in numbers, reaching half a billion paid subscribers by 2019.
Of course, only time will tell if the predictions are true, in the meantime, we can only wait and see at what rate more people begin to adopt music-streaming services.
Do you use a music-streaming service? If so, are you a paid subscriber? And if not, why do you chose other methods of listening to music? Let us know in the comments below!
Digital Music News, Forbes