Apple Music Subscriptions Seemingly Off To A Flying Start

Tim Cook said yesterday that the company already had 6.5 million paid subscribers to its Apple Music service (and 15 million users) since its launch at the end of June of this year.

That gives us about 8.5 million users that are still working their way through the free three month trail offered by Apple for new users.

So, since the launch in late June, Apple has added about 2.167 million subscribers on average for the first three months since launch.

Spotify in comparision has 20 million paid subscribers as of June 2015 which took them six and a half years to gain.

Per their press release in June, the company said that they gained 10 million subscribers after their first five and a half years which gives us an adoption rate of roughly 150,000 paid subscribers added per month on average for their first ten million. In the release, they also said that they added the next ten million in just a year so that rate has galloped ahead to an average of 833k average paid subscriber additions/month.

Pandora has 79.4 million active users (June 2015 per the company's investor presentation slides) but does not break out how many of them are paid subscribers. Various estimates are in the 4-7% range for Pandora's paid subscribers. Let's just take 5% as a round number for paid subscribers which gives Pandora an estimated base of 4 million paid subscribers at present.

Apple seems to have already blown away both its major competitors already.

Admittedly, Apple is still in its infancy as far as it's music streaming service is concerned and many early adapters could have simply forgot to cancel their automatic renewals when their free trials expired, so these very early numbers could be skewed.

A flying start nonetheless.

Not that investors seem to care too much.

The shares are indicated lower in pre-opening trade along with our index futures.

(long apple shares, long and short apple options)