Earlier in 2018 Spotify reassured itself as the number 1 streaming platform of the world reaching 70 million paying subscribers with Apple Music as a runner-up being around 30 million subscribers behind.
Although not everything is bitter for apple music, according to The Wall Street Journal Apple has been gaining subscribers at a higher rate than Spotify, especially in the United States, which is a key location for streaming platforms, regarding that The U.S is, in fact, the major streamer in the world.
In Overall Spotify remains in the 1st place, but it has been slowing down, with a 2 percent growth per month, while Apple Music holds the first place America and becomes a growing challenge to Spotify, it also happens to be growing 5 percent per month. The WSJ said that they currently hold 36 million subscribers and counting, this triggered the prediction of the Apple Music market dominance by this summer.
Apple Music rises closer to the top of the charts
The Wall Street Journal explains that Apple’s growth has been determined by the number of devices that have been released into consumers hands in the past 2 years. Apple as the corporate giant it is, represents diversity in its very own unity, seeing that there will be a HomePod speaker release next week, so loyalists will have more means to power Apple Music streaming services.
As a streaming service developed by Apple, the public could be prejudicial by expecting something amazing, but the advantage provided by Apple music is that the user can select music to stream on demand. There is also the choice to listen to curated and existing playlists, and also the radio station Beats 1, which is available for streaming in over 100 countries available any time of the day.
Although Apple music has been well received because of its For me section, which features intuitive and refined recommendations for the user, the service has been criticized by few as confusing to use and not very intuitive.
How’s Spotify holding up?
Spotify, however, has many privileges, being a music, video, and podcast streaming service that has seen critical growth since it’s creation. It also provides musicians with DRM protected content from labels and media companies and managed to be a pioneer in Digital Rights Management.
DRM has not been universally accepted, but its proponents like for example Spotify argue that it is a necessary legal basis in order to protect intellectual property, from being copied freely in the web. This is a reason why Spotify has been a major target for musicians, given the fact that Apple dropped DRM from Itunes files in 2009.
So Spotify may maintain a lot of value despite its possible fall down during summer.
Source: The Wall Street Journal