Apple Music Vs. Spotify: Which Streaming Service Has More Paid Subscribers?

Apple Music, the Cupertino giant’s music and video streaming service, has reached another milestone. The number of its paid subscribers has hit the 40-million mark, an impressive feat for the almost 3-year-old service.

Apple France content director Steven Huon announced the good news Wednesday by posting a screenshot of the Apple Music app to Twitter. Visible in the image is the counter that indicates that Apple’s streaming service now has 40 million subscribers.

Huon’s tweet comes about two weeks after Apple Senior Vice President Eddy Cue revealed during an interview at the South by Southwest festival that Apple Music’s subscribers have reached 38 million. Cue noted at the time how the streaming service gained two million new subscribers in a little over a month, as pointed out by Apple Insider.

Taking into account Huon’s tweet, Apple Music has once again exhibited significant growth in a short span of time. In the two-week gap between Huon’s tweet and Cue’s interview, the service gained two million more subscribers. This just proves that Apple Music’s reach is quickly expanding week after week.

Despite its latest milestone, Apple Music still trails behind Spotify. The music, podcast and video streaming service announced in the first week of January that it had 70 million paying subscribers worldwide, according to The Verge. The Swedish company hasn’t publicly updated its subscriber count since, but it’s very likely for its number of subscribers to have significantly increased given that it reached the 70-million mark three months ago.

There is also a wide gap between the total number of the two streaming services’ users. Cue has said that Apple Music has 8 million people listening to the service on a trial basis. This means Apple Music has a total of 48 million users. On the other hand, Spotify announced last June that its total number of active users was at 140 million.

Nevertheless, Cue maintained that the most important thing about streaming services is that they are giving opportunities for artists to showcase their music to the world. “The real opportunity for music — and it's not about Spotify or us or the labels, it's about artists — is how do they get their music to everyone around the world and how do they get compensated for that,” Cue said.