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Report: Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify

If Apple Music and Spotify keep adding subscribers at their current rates, Apple Music will soon bump out Spotify as the number one streaming service.

February 4, 2018
Spotify vs Apple Music

More and more people are rocking out to Apple Music instead of Spotify, and if Apple Music continues to grow at its current rate, it will officially overtake Spotify this summer as the streaming world's No. 1 service," The Wall Street Journal reports.

The news likely doesn't thrill Spotify, which is prepping a spring initial public offering—which will be unconventional, as the company plans to just list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange and let the market figure out the rest rather than hiring an investment bank to issue new shares and sell them on the company's behalf.

According to people familiar with streaming figures for Apple Music and Spotify, the former has a monthly growth rate of around 5 percent. Spotify, on the other hand, has a growth rate of just around 2 percent. If that keeps up, Apple Music will bump Spotify off the top in summer—and there's no reason to believe it can't, given that part of Apple's success in building an audience for Apple Music lies in the fact that the service comes bundled with most of the major devices the company sells.

Part of the difficulty in figuring out which music streaming service has the most subscribers is that they all have interesting ways of defining total audience size. Both, for example, count each individual user in a family plan to give their stats a bit of a bump instead of just counting the family plan as a single "subscriber." As the Journal notes, some subscribers might gain access to either service as part of a bundle deal with their mobile carriers or as part of a package deal that offers access to other streaming services, like Hulu.

Apple, in fact, would already have a larger audience for Apple Music than Spotify right now if the company counted the users participating in its trial periods. All Apple Music subscribers initially go through a free trial before becoming full, paying members, whereas Spotify offers a free streaming tier that users can stay on for as long as they like. Typically, Spotify likes to tease both subscriber counts and user counts whenever each number reaches a significant milestone.

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David Murphy got his first real taste of technology journalism when he arrived at PC Magazine as an intern in 2005. A three-month gig turned to six months, six months turned to occasional freelance assignments, and he later rejoined his tech-loving, mostly New York-based friends as one of PCMag.com's news contributors. For more tech tidbits from David Murphy, follow him on Facebook or Twitter (@thedavidmurphy).

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