Spotify Doesn’t Seem Worried About Apple Music
This week, Apple unveiled its new streaming music service called Apple Music. Apple Music will allow subscribers to listen to any song in the iTunes library. Besides being created by Apple, the new service is practically identical to other services.
Apple’s main competition will be with the popular music-streaming service, Spotify. Spotify allows desktop users to play whatever’s in the Spotify library for free. If a user wants to go ad-free or listen on-demand on mobile devices, they’ll have to pay $9.99-a-month.
Spotify doesn’t seem to be worried about Apple Music yet. In a blog post, Spotify announced that the company has 20 million paying subscribers. The company also boasted 75 million total active users.
As The Verge points out, Spotify has a nice lead over Apple. Since Apple Music is just now starting in 2015, it may mean a slow road for the service. Beats Music–the service Apple recently acquired–will transition into Apple Music. That means that Apple will at least have around 300,000 guaranteed subscribers to its new service.
The Cupertino giant has a way of making critics eat their words. Many people criticized devices like the iPad, which were a major success. If Apple is able to make Apple Music stand out from the competition, they’ll be the leader of the music-streaming world in no time.
In Spotify’s blog post, the company addressed the concerns of the music industry.
“And, more people listening on Spotify means more payouts to the creators of the music you love. As we grow, the amount of royalties we pay out to artists, songwriters and rights holders continues to climb faster than ever. We have now paid more than $3 billion USD in royalties, including more than $300 million in the first three months of 2015 alone.”
The music industry and Spotify have not gotten along. Spotify maintains that it should have a free tier that supports ads, while music labels want the service to ditch the ads and start charging all of its users. Getting rid of its ad-supported free option is something Spotify will probably never do unless its forced to.
Spotify’s CEO had a two-word response to the news of Apple diving into the music-streaming business. In a long-since deleted Tweet, Daniel Ek said “Oh, ok.” apparently showing his unconcern in the launch of Apple’s service.
Apple Music launches June 30 so we won’t have to wait long to give the service a try. Apple is going to be giving away free 1-month trials, after which you pay $9.99-a-month.
[Photo by Andrew Burton / Getty Images]
