Apple today announced that Apple Music has reached the 100 million song milestone. iTunes and the original iPod debuted 21 years ago, with “1,000 songs in your pocket.”
One hundred million songs.
Twenty-one years on from the invention of iTunes and the debut of the original iPod, we’ve gone from 1,000 songs in your pocket to 100,000x that on Apple Music. It’s phenomenal growth by any metric. The entire history, present, and future of music is at your fingertips or voice command.
More music than you can listen to in a lifetime, or several lifetimes. More music than any other platform. Simply the biggest collection of music, in any format, ever.
Apple Music’s global head of editorial Rachel Newman said that the rise of Apple Music has helped democratize the music industry as a whole amid a massive expansion of content:
Back in the 1960s, only 5,000 new albums were released each year. Today, anywhere in the world, in 167 countries and regions on Apple Music, any artist of any description can write and record a song and release it globally. Every day, over 20,000 singers and songwriters are delivering new songs to Apple Music — songs that make our catalog even better than it was the day before. One hundred million songs is evidence of a more democratic space, where anyone, even a new artist making music out of their bedroom, can have the next big hit.
Newman also pointed out that Apple Music seeks to provide more context for music on the platform, such as via Apple Music Today:
We also know that it’s more important than ever that we are elevating artists’ voices and providing opportunities for them to tell their own stories and contextualize their music. It is no longer enough to just connect artists and fans, it’s about making those connections deeper and more meaningful. And just one of the many ways we are helping to provide context is through the new Apple Music Today series, where we’ll be picking a new song every day and diving into its history, because we know that each of the 100 million songs in our catalog has its own story.