Apple Music has 20 million subscribers 18 months after launch, according to stats released by Apple. But the music industry expected more, and so apparently do some Apple executives.
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Apple Music has passed 20 million subscribers, an increase of 15% in the last 3 months. Apple also shared that 60% percent of customers using Apple Music have not bought content from the iTunes Music Store in the last 12 months – some were dormant users, but “the vast majority are new customers.”
“It’s been quite a year,” says Apple executive Eddie Cue told Billboard. “We were thrilled to see that we could take 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 [on streams alone], and I can’t recall that being done before.”
Cue continued: “Of course we want more and we want it to go faster – we’re hungry! …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.”
On Exclusives
“I don’t think exclusives or promotions are anything new”, Cue told the BBC. “They were done in the record business, they were done on iTunes, now they’re being done on streaming. The exclusives are relatively short term – it’s not something that stays on any one platform. But being able to do unique things with artists is a good thing and I think that’ll continue”.
Apple hosted 70 exclusives in 2016, 6 of which topped the Billboard charts.