Spotify announced on Wednesday that it now enjoys over 40 million paying subscribers as of this month. That is a 10 million subscriber increase over the March 2016 figure of 30 million. The service is the top music streaming service globally, and boasts a much faster subscriber growth rate than its biggest rival, Apple Music.
While Apple Music has been growing at a rate of around 2 million new subscribers every two months, with 17 million paid subscribers as of this month, Spotify has easily outpaced the upstart service with a pace of over 3 million new subscribers per month.
Spotify vice president Jonathan Forster earlier this year was quoted as saying Apple Music is “raising the profile of streaming,” and is helping, not hurting, his company’s business.
“It’s great that Apple is in the game. They are definitely raising the profile of streaming. It is hard to build an industry on your own,” said Forster. “Since Apple Music started we’ve been growing quicker and adding more users than before.”
Spotify has had its share of spats with Apple. Most recently, Apple rejected a new version of Spotify’s app for iOS when the new version replaced an in-app signup option with a link to an external signup page. Spotify accused Apple of using its App Store app approval process to harm its competitors, while Apple fired back saying the streaming company was asking for an exemption to the rules Apple applies evenly to all developers. (Apple requires iOS developers who sell subscriptions to offer them via an in-app purchase, of which Apple receives a cut.)
(Via MacRumors)
