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.