Estimates suggest that Apple Music had 93 million subscribers worldwide in June 2023, up by five million from the previous year. Launched in 2015 by U.S. tech giant Apple, Apple Music is the second largest music streaming service worldwide, competing with market leader Spotify. Spotify remains market leader While Apple Music is a popular music streaming platform, accounting for 19 percent of subscribers worldwide, the 2008 founded streaming service Spotify remains the market leader with a subscriber share of 35 percent. Financially this meant that the Swedish company generated a global revenue of 1.7 billion euros only through its Premium accounts in the third quarter of 2020. Music streaming overall increasesOverall, music streaming has experienced significant growth over the last decade. From 2018 to 2019 alone music streaming revenue grew by 22.9 percent becoming the music industry’s main revenue driver, reaching a revenue of 11.4 billion U.S. dollars worldwide in 2019. With the coronavirus pandemic, the growing digital music consumption was estimated to increase even further in 2020 and 2021.

The most successful music streaming service in the United States was Apple Music as of September, with the most up to date information showing that 49.5 million users accessed the platform each month. Spotify closely followed, with a similarly impressive 47.7 million monthly users.

What is a music streaming service?

Music streaming services provide their users with a database compiled of songs, playlists, albums and videos, where content can be accessed online, downloaded, shared, bookmarked and organized.

The music streaming business is huge, and has sometimes been lauded as the savior of the music industry. The biggest two services are in constant competition for the monopoly of the market. Apple Music was launched in 2015, whereas Spotify has been around since 2008. Other popular streaming services include Deezer, SoundCloud and iHeartRadio.

Do artists make a lot of money from streaming services? 

In short, unfortunately not. Both Apple Music and Spotify have been frequently criticized for the tiny royalty payments they offer artists. Particularly for emerging talent, streaming services are far from a lucrative source of income. Bigger, established stars like Taylor Swift are more likely to regularly make a good amount of money this way. But either way, a track needs to go viral or be streamed several million times before it earns any real cash.

Context

Apple Inc. is an American hardware and software developer and technology company that develops and sells computers, smartphones and consumer electronics as well as operating systems and application software. Apple also operates internet sales portals for music, films and software.

Market capitalization of Apple (AAPL)

Market cap: $3.681 Trillion USD

As of January 2025 Apple has a market cap of $3.681 Trillion USD. This makes Apple the world's most valuable company by market cap according to our data. The market capitalization, commonly called market cap, is the total market value of a publicly traded company's outstanding shares and is commonly used to measure how much a company is worth.

Revenue for Apple (AAPL)

Revenue in 2024 (TTM): $391.03 Billion USD

According to Apple's latest financial reports the company's current revenue (TTM ) is $391.03 Billion USD. In 2023 the company made a revenue of $385.70 Billion USD a decrease over the revenue in the year 2022 that were of $387.53 Billion USD. The revenue is the total amount of income that a company generates by the sale of goods or services. Unlike with the earnings no expenses are subtracted.

Content

Geography: USA

Time period: December 1980- January 2025

Unit of analysis: Apple Stock Data 2024

Variables

Acknowledgements

This dataset belongs to me. I’m sharing it here for free. You may do with it as you wish.

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How many paid subscribers does Spotify have? As of the fourth quarter of 2024, Spotify had 263 million premium subscribers worldwide, up from 236 million in the corresponding quarter of 2023. Spotify’s subscriber base has increased dramatically in the last few years and has more than doubled since early 2019. Spotify and competitors Spotify is a music streaming service originally founded in 2006 in Sweden. The platform can be used from various devices and allows users to browse through a catalogue of music licensed through multiple record labels, as well as creating and sharing playlists with other users. Additionally, listeners are able to enjoy music for free with advertisements or are also given the option to purchase a subscription to allow for unlimited ad-free music streaming. Spotify’s largest competitors are Pandora, a company that offers a similar service and remains popular in the United States, and Apple Music, which was launched in 2015. While Pandora was once among the highest-grossing music apps in the Apple App Store, recent rankings show that global services like QQ Music, NetEase Cloud Music, and YouTube Music now generate higher monthly revenues.Users are also able to register Spotify accounts using Facebook directly through the website using an app. This enables them to connect with other Facebook friends and explore their music tastes and playlists. Spotify is a popular source for keeping up-to-date with music, and the ability to enjoy Spotify anywhere at any time allows consumers to shape their music consumption around their lifestyles and preferences.

According to the most recently available data, the average amount of time spent listening to Spotify by the platform’s active users was 25 hours per month. The idea of spending more than an entire day per month streaming Spotify content might sound unbelievable, but internet usage is higher than ever and vastly supersedes time spent with radio, print media and even television. Streaming has become one of the most popular media activities in the world, and Spotify is the global market leader when it comes to digital music streaming.

Spotify and the music market

Spotify dominates the global music streaming market and offers artists serious amounts of exposure, with some musicians garnering audiences of several million each month. The company’s user base has increased dramatically, even in the face of antitrust complaints and competition from Apple Music, as well as users expressing concern over how little Spotify pays its artists.

In 2018, music streaming revenue amounted to 8.9 billion U.S. dollars worldwide, more than six times the figure recorded for 2013. Whilst revenue growth has slowed, this is not the case when it comes to subscriber numbers, which in Spotify’s case have been increasing at a quarterly rate. Spotify reported 96 million premium subscribers worldwide at the end of 2018, finishing the year with a flourish after regular growth and accumulating 25 million more paid users in just twelve months.

The company also commands more than 30 percent of music streaming subscribers worldwide, outperforming both Apple Music and Amazon.

As of March 2018, Spotify’s user base was dominated by Millennials, with 29 percent of its users aged 25 to 34 and 26 percent aged between 18 and 24 years old. The streaming giant has permanently altered how consumers discover, engage with and share music, and according to a 2018 survey, Spotify reaches almost half of 16 to 24 year olds in the United States each week.

The power of Spotify

Spotify’s popularity is undeniable, accumulating millions of premium subscribers worldwide each quarter and hundreds of millions of unique visitors to Spotify.com every month. In the United States, Spotify is one of the most commonly used apps for listening to podcasts, and despite being in constant competition with Apple Music, remains a large part of U.S. music listeners’ lives.

A survey revealed that Spotify is also the preferred music streaming service among 18 to 29-year-olds, which may seem unremarkable given the data on Spotify’s user base, but serves as further evidence of Spotify’s popularity among younger users. Whether Spotify’s growth will last forever, only time will tell, particularly as Apple Music continues to put up a good fight and smaller but increasingly popular services such as Deezer begin to make their mark. But with the company recording a profit in early 2019 for the first time since its inception, Spotify remains very much a market leader and firmly on the path to future success.