Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Apple Music Now Has Over 30M Paid Subscribers, Up from 27M in June

nrose101 said:
Odd I have tons of my old purchases -- Going back to 2003 not on phone and hidden just fine.
Click to expand...

So, instead of a toggle like I suggest, you think the burden should be on the user to opt-OUT of displaying thousands of purchased songs from showing up on their phone, one at a a time?! Insanity.
 
Probably with the new lte Apple Watch and upcoming homePod, this number will increase
 
nrose101 said:
Playlists work great on Apple Music. Spotify is horrible sound quality. Even paid. They use mp3. The audio spectrum for that codec is horrible compared to AAC.
Click to expand...
I agree but Play Music sounds way worse. Spotify kills your phone battery though.
 
OtherJesus said:
Wrong. You have a good troll effort though.

I left Spotify, recently in fact. Tired of their UI and Apple Music has very much improved.
Click to expand...
Different strokes, I suppose. But if you like discovering new music, there is simply no comparison. Spotify's algorithms are not even in the same ballpark.
[doublepost=1506616953][/doublepost]
Rogifan said:
I was Spotify subscriber before Apple Music.
Click to expand...
Why did you decide to downgrade?

/troll
 
Apple would potentially earn more with a free Apple Music that's true. Since it's there on android too, it would not be stupid to say they could reach more than half a million. And if Apple would have launched a free music service, amazon, google, and the others would also have.

I believe what jimmy iovine has to say on this. Apple is not stupid to have a paid only subscription.

30 million multiplied by $120 a year = $3.6 billion

Whereas 400 million multiplied by an average of $50 a year = $20 billion a year.

And honestly, Apple would earn much much more than $50 per subscriber with ads...

So I believe in what Apple is doing here
 
nrose101 said:
Don't you mean 30m people want better sounding audio and switched to Apple Music?
[doublepost=1506610163][/doublepost]

Playlists work great on Apple Music. Spotify is horrible sound quality. Even paid. They use mp3. The audio spectrum for that codec is horrible compared to AAC.
Click to expand...

That’s not true. Spotify uses 320kbps ogg vorbis if you enable the highest quality as a premium customer. Still, though, I find that Apple Music’s 256kbps AAC sounds better, especially over Bluetooth, as my Bose QC35’s support AAC over Bluetooth streaming, which means there are no transcoding going on (not possible with Spotify). This also means that Apple Music is much friendlier on the phones battery. Spotify uses significantly more battery as it needs to transcode absolutely everything, which also means lesser audio quality.

I also like Apple Music for many other reasons. Apples UI is better. Spotify feels like the Winamp of streaming services to me. Spotify is great for playlists like someone said. But Apple Music is a much better music service overall, and it’s suggestions and radios are better than Spotify’s daily playlists in my opinion. I used Spotify since it was only available in Scandinavia back in the beta days, before anyone in the US had even heard about it.
 
KazKam said:
So, instead of a toggle like I suggest, you think the burden should be on the user to opt-OUT of displaying thousands of purchased songs from showing up on their phone, one at a a time?! Insanity.
Click to expand...

Why not. How is apple supposed to know which ones you don't want anymore. One of the joys of music collection is catalogging and refining.
 
Apple is foregoing nearly $3.5Bn a month with its subscription model just to make it's 60m subscriber's feel "special." Maybe this is of interest to Apple shareholders?
This is a crazy as forcing everybody with an iTunes account to have a U2 album?
 
E3BK said:
I tried AM when it first launched and it screwed up my whole library so I cancelled after the free trial. It definitely was not ready for prime time. But I wasn't paying for Spotify yet either. I just had a very large personal library. Eventually, I went the Spotify Premium route. Excellent playlists. I love being able to control the device that's playing w/ other devices that have Spotify installed. I definitely bought into the streaming music idea. I LOVE the Daily Mixes.

But after the whole Snowy acquisition and their clear intention to shelve this product rather than be honest to their customers really just pushed me back to AM. So I gave it another try and it's much better now. This time, I started from scratch - an empty library. And anything that was missing from AM, I added in as I went. But most of whatever I was looking for, was there. I use Houdini to transfer Spotify playlists to AM (including my Daily Mixes). And now I have music on my Watch (though we've got other issues w/ Watch OS4 and the music app).

I do miss being able to use other devices as "remotes" to control playback but neither are perfect so I'll stick with the one that suits me best. YMMV
Click to expand...

KazKam said:
Several things happened when they integrated AM into the music app that made listening to music for non-AM subscribers anywhere from a hassle to downright painful.

One was the automatic display of ALL iTunes/iCloud purchases being displayed at the top level of the Music app. This is the behavior with or without AM turned on. This is extremely inconvenient if you don't want the soundtracks you purchased for your wife or the lullaby's you purchased for your kids or the U2 album Apple foisted on it's users, to appear in your library. This also caused another headache...

If you don't want all those purchases, that you didn't download/sync, in your library, and you don't want to use your data for streaming, or just can't, you have to go into "Downloaded Music" every single time you want to use the music app the way you used to be able to use the app out-of-the-box. Which I assume is the way myself and anyone else not subscribing to AM would like to use the app.

I could go on, but I have work to do...

In essence, they borked the music app for anyone who doesn't subscribe to AM, anyone who doesn't want to stream their music, and anyone that spends any time at all curating the music and playlists they sync to their phones. Not even to mention the headaches of using music on CarPlay without AM.
Click to expand...

KazKam said:
You can't. They show up in your library regardless. Many of my issues with the app would be resolved if they added one, simple toggle in the music settings... "Display iCloud music not on this phone: Yes/No"
Click to expand...

All of the above. Plus all the weird stuff with AM replacing songs on your device with alternative versions etc. The initial launch of AM was such a nightmare for the way I listen to music, I dropped it, got Spotify and never looked back. Maybe I'll give AM another shot.
 
Apple Music UI is just a mess? I have 6 months free with EE so that's pretty much the only reason I'm using it at the moment. I love Spotify but I do sort of wish they had a white/light option instead of the black UI.

RE: Apple Music - I hate that whenever you add a song to play next or library, it comes up with a little square thing saying it's been added, it's slow and unnecessary and slows me down when I want to add a bunch. I hate the look of the 'New Playlist' option etc, the big massive square just to add a new playlist is horrible. It just feels so clunky, like iTunes did back in like 2009.

Overall, it's okay but it's just not as perfected and refined as Spotify is.
 
no Free tier on Apple Music as the reason low numbers ... ok if you wanna cherry pick.. They can be many reasons for that,and i don't think not having a free tier is one of them.. It just means no one has figured out yet how to cancel their subscriptions.
 
unobtainium said:
30m people have never tried Spotify.
Click to expand...
I tried it, and they didn't have half the music I searched for. Apple Music seems to have a bigger selection.
[doublepost=1506655885][/doublepost]
4ppleg1rl said:
Apple Music UI is just a mess? I have 6 months free with EE so that's pretty much the only reason I'm using it at the moment. I love Spotify but I do sort of wish they had a white/light option instead of the black UI.

RE: Apple Music - I hate that whenever you add a song to play next or library, it comes up with a little square thing saying it's been added, it's slow and unnecessary and slows me down when I want to add a bunch. I hate the look of the 'New Playlist' option etc, the big massive square just to add a new playlist is horrible. It just feels so clunky, like iTunes did back in like 2009.

Overall, it's okay but it's just not as perfected and refined as Spotify is.
Click to expand...
Slow animations everywhere that block user input. It sucks. I used to jailbreak just to 100% disable animations systemwide, but that's no longer an option.
 
richb330 said:
30M subscribers at an average of 9.99pm is £3.5B pa....
if my maths is right..?

that's impressive for an initiative that's what, just over 2 years old?
Click to expand...

The pricing is different depending on where you are, Here it's 8 dollars for the family plan, and 5 for the individual.

But even them if you consider it has no free tier to lure people in, and its very new, the growth is amazing!
 
0837990 said:
That’s not true. Spotify uses 320kbps ogg vorbis if you enable the highest quality as a premium customer.
Click to expand...
Why are their formats MP3 and ogg vorbis? Weird.
[doublepost=1506656278][/doublepost]
brianvictor7 said:
Guilty. But in my defense, I like having my songs all coordinated through iTunes and now automatically synced through iCloud. Still working through some bugs, but it is pretty cool.
Click to expand...
Common trend. Despite the flaws, you know Apple's service will work nicely with everything and that you'll be well supported going forward. As much as I moan about the GUI of iTunes and the Music app, here I am still using both. I'm mostly angry that they've become worse over time, which shouldn't be the case with tech.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: brianvictor7
joueboy said:
More like that would have been Spotify’s paid subscribers. Too bad they lost me when Apple offered the the famiy plan and I’m stuck with them since.
Click to expand...
What? Spotify has had a family plan for years. 1+5 people for a total of six.

https://www.spotify.com/us/family/

Originally it was for two people, but Spotify changed their plan price and model in response to Apple.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: arkitect
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back