When it comes to Apple analysis, you’ve got to know what to get up front.
Writing for USA Today, Jefferson Graham says “Apple lost millions of Music users when trial ended; 6.5M remain.” (Tip o’ the antlers to VFXPilot and Joe Zou.)
Apple lost millions of users. That’s the key takeaway here. If you get one thing out of this, it should be that.
[Reads to the end where it says “Oh, and technology journalism is irreparably broken.”]
Those paying subscribers are just a slice of the users who agreed to try out the service on a trial basis starting June 30, suggesting millions weren’t sold on the service by the time the first three-month trial ended in late September.
A slice! A soupçon. Un petit peu. A very small number of them. Not much!
But… what percentage?
A month after launch, in early August, Apple said it had locked in 11 million trial members.
So, Apple kept 6.5 million out of 11 million. That kind of slice, homeslice.
With the holidays coming up, this is an awesome tip from USA Today. When it comes time for pumpkin pie after dinner, say “I’ll just have a slice.”
Then take 60 percent of the pie. If anyone complains, say it’s still a slice.
Actually, maybe the truly good advice is don’t have USA Today writers over for holiday meals.
Now let’s go to an analyst who perhaps can validate the very negative headline, whoops, nope:
Daniel Ives, an analyst with FBR & Co., said 6.5 million paid subscribers is a better number than he had expected and shows that Apple Music is “off to a solid start.”
There’s burying the lede and then there’s trying to swap the lede with its alternate dimension anti-lede, the evil lede with the goatee. When the analysis mostly points to these numbers being, you know, pretty good, but your emphasis is that this is pretty bad, you might have gotten something backwards. Like the whole premise.