Founder CEO Daniel Ek has revealed in a tweet that his Swedish streaming music service ‘Spotify’ has now reached over 30 million paid subscribers.
In perspective that’s up 10 million as compared to June 2015, and 20 million more than in 2014! This is the first subscriber update Spotify has given out since it announced it had 20 million subscribers days before Apple Music hit the market last June, and demonstrates that the increased competition lately has had little to no effect on Spotify’s growth.
Infact, since the nine months that Apple Music has been available, the service has picked up 11 million subscribers, Spotify has added 10 million paid subscribers in the same time.
This isn’t to say that Spotify is withstanding the competition. Apple Music took half a year to reach 10 million subscribers, for example, while upstarts like Tidal who are growing in the streaming industry themselves. It instead suggests that there is plenty of room to grow in the streaming music market as a whole.
Evidently, Spotify is picking up some speed. It’s not clear how many free users are in the mix, but it’s safe to say that there are more than the 75 million from nearly a year ago.
This is despite the lack of release day albums from major artists like Adele, Coldplay, Drake, Future, Rihanna, The 1975, and Kanye West which may have upset many Spotify users, Apple Music and Tidal haven’t been able to pull a substantial number of users away from the service or convince new customers to avoid Spotify. Only Yesterday it was revealed Gwen Stefani: all blockbuster artists who have put their new material on Apple Music (and/or other paid services) on day one, but have held it back from Spotify. Stefani’s new album, This Is What The Truth Feels Like, was released on Friday (March 18) via Interscope in the US and Polydor in the UK and still hasn’t been released on Spotify.
Instead of paying for exclusives, Spotify has largely tried to engineer its way out of this problem, building algorithmic playlists like Discover Weekly that help users surface music they should like from the service’s still-massive library.
Spotify’s numbers and recent iOS charts show that streaming music is becoming one of the most lucrative businesses on mobile devices.
Apple Music will likely receive some big updates this fall as part of iOS 10, Pandora is prepping its first on-demand streaming service, and industry sources say the launch of YouTube Red has gone well.
For now Spotify is the biggest game in on demand streaming, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change anytime soon.
