Apple likes to wow the public with the progress of its music service, but it might be Spotify that really deserves your slow clap. Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple boasted at an iPhone 7 launch event on Wednesday that its subscription streaming service Apple Music has amassed 17 million paying members since its launch in June 2015. 2 million were added in less than three months .
That's encouraging growth, but a quick count shows that Apple and Spotify are adding subscribers at about the same rate. And thanks to a big lead, Spotify beats Apple in terms of volume.
The figures confirm that more consumers are choosing to stream music at a buffet instead of buying songs a la carte. This is partly due to the strong marketing that Apple has put into its on-demand music service.
The numbers also offer a new perspective on the horse race between the two companies that has unraveled this year..
Spotify and Apple have both updated their subscriber numbers in the past two weeks, and both released their membership numbers about five months earlier, giving an indication of how much each service has grown over roughly the same period.
Spotify added 9 million members to more than 39 million from the end of March to the end of August. Apple Music has added 4 million subscribers to 17 million in the four and a half months since the end of April.
This means that both Apple and Spotify have seen membership growth of about 30 percent over roughly the same period.
But because Spotify already had a much larger subscriber base, the actual number of sign-ups was more than double that of Apple's service. If Apple wants to close the gap and overtake Spotify, it needs to start growing faster than its competitors..
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