Will Apple Music Be Able to Compete with SoundCloud Go?
Why Apple's Stock Fell following Its Fiscal 2Q16 Results
The launch of SoundCloud Go
Last month, Fortune reported that SoundCloud was another entrant into the paid subscription-based music streaming market. SoundCloud’s Go service, priced at $9.99 per month, will provide “amateur remixes, but also the artists’ official recordings,” similar to Spotify and Apple Music (AAPL).
According to the report, SoundCloud Go will have a catalog of around 125 million songs compared to a catalog of 30 million songs each for Apple Music and Spotify. SoundCloud Go has its music subscription apps on both Alphabet’s (GOOG) Android and Apple’s iOS devices.
Pandora Media (P) has a music subscription service called Pandora One, which is priced at around $5 per month. Pandora already has a 10% market share in the United States, and the company stated in its fiscal 2015 earnings call that it believes its music subscription business will be worth $1.3 billion over the next five years.
Radio streaming gains ground
According to the RIAA’s (Recording Industry Association of America) shipment and revenue statistics, streaming services made up 34.3% of total revenues in the US recording industry in 2015. As the above chart shows, paid subscription-based music streaming contributed $1.2 billion to total music streaming revenue in the United States in 2015.
Apple accounts for 15.6% of the Technology Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLK). Other top holdings of the ETF include Microsoft (MSFT) at 10%, Facebook (FB) at 5.6%, and Google (GOOGL) at 5.1%.
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