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Spotify's position on Apple's music streaming service in the United States is shrinking, reducing invincibility around the recently launched pioneer.
Spotify remains world leader, the highest growth rate of the global music market reflects its ability to push its services to the owners of its devices, such as the iPhone.
The growing relevance of Apple Music in the streaming market has been highlighted over the past two weeks with the release of Scorpion by Drake, which is expected to be the biggest album of the year. 39; year. In the first 24 hours of its release, it was broadcast on Apple Music 170m times, while Spotify recorded only 130m of stream, despite three times more users
"You literally could not browse Drake on Spotify "said a label executive. "But Apple was really able to spark engagement."
Spotify, Apple and other streaming services do not publicly divide their number of subscribers per country, but they report the numbers to music distributors and record companies.
Since last week, Apple had between 21 and 21.5 million US subscribers, while Spotify was 22m to 22.5m, according to industry leaders. A year ago, Spotify had about 17 million US subscribers to 13 million Apple, say these people.
Music executives are waiting for Apple to get closer to Spotify in the US next month. Apple is expected to end the year with about 27 million US subscribers to the 24 million spotify, according to internal forecasts seen by the FT. Apple's music service has also grown faster than Spotify's in the UK and Canada, countries that have been big fans of the iTunes store, said the executives.
"Spotify has always targeted music lovers, who tend to be a little younger and have been the first to adopt streaming," said Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Midia Research. "A lot of that base has been absorbed now, while Apple has a much wider customer base." They can easily bring in these ordinary people because [Apple Music] is already in their phone, and they already have their information credit card. "
Globally, Spotify remains largely the leader in digital music. The company, which also offers a free service, said it has registered 75 million paying customers by the end of March, and expects that this increase will reach nearly 100 million. here the end of the year.
Apple recently claimed to have 50 million subscribers in May, although this includes people who have enrolled in a free trial, inflating the number. Amazon became a third contender in the race: the company said in April to have "tens of millions" of subscribers for its music streaming service, but declined to give an exact figure.
Spotify is facing greater scrutiny of its subscriber numbers as a public company – investors are worried about user growth because the $ 30 billion company is still in deficit. a bundled subscription package with Hulu, the video streaming site that rivals Netflix. Spotify also offered a three-month trial of its 99 cent premium service in select markets, and reorganized its free service to attract new customers to its app.
It is expected to release its latest worldwide subscriber numbers on July 26, as well as its quarterly profits.
Daniel Ek, co-founder and CEO of Spotify, has swept concerns about the threat of Apple. "We do not see any significant impact of competition," he said at a call for investors in May. "We do not think it's a winner taking the whole market."
Apple and Spotify declined to comment
Additional reportage by Tim Bradshaw in Los Angeles
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