Despite Apple Music’s smaller base of subscribed users, they have already proved that they can dominate their rival Spotify. A report from analytics firm Verto has highlighted that Apple Music comes out top in terms of monthly unique users, which is largely down to the 3-month free trial that the platform offers.
During February, in the US, Apple Music attracted an eye-watering 40.7 million users meaning they were ahead of Pandora at 32.6 million and Spotify at 30.4 million. Fourth place was awarded to iHeartRadio and SoundCloud was placed fifth. However, these numbers included mobile users only.
The three-month free trial that Apple Music offers has allowed the platform to gain more than double the amount of people who use it in the U.S. A huge benefit is that the app comes pre-installed on all iOS devices. Apple have always kept the exact amount of subscribers to Apple Music under wraps, but they have stated recently that the platform has a lot more than 20 million paying subscribers worldwide. Spotify, however, have claimed 50 million paying users with over 100 million that use their free service.
Apple could attribute this success to the exclusive releases they gain from certain artists, such as Drake who recently released his latest playlist More Life through the platform’s radio Beats 1. Highlights such as this are what gives this platform a leg-up compared to it’s competitors and platforms such as Spotify haven’t failed to take cues from Apple Music. Recently, the company announced that it would be debuting an original show called ‘Traffic Jams’ in the same vein as Apple’s ‘Carpool Karaoke’ set to be released soon.