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Spotify announces a 20 million head start on Apple Music

Spotify announces a 20 million head start on Apple Music

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Apple Music is designed to go head to head with Spotify, but that doesn’t seem to be worrying the music streaming service. While the CEO of Spotify only had two words for Apple’s announcement, a new blog post today reveals that 20 million people are now paying to use Spotify. That’s an impressive figure and a reasonable head start for Spotify against Apple. It's also two times the paid users of the 10 million this time last year. Spotify now has 75 million active users in total, up 87 percent from the 40 million last year. It’s clear that while the service is growing overall, subscriptions appear to be holding up well despite the availability of free streaming.

Addressing criticisms of low royalty payments, Spotify is revealing today that it has now paid out more than $3 billion in royalties. The streaming service says it has paid more than $300 million between January and March this year alone. If Spotify maintains its current growth rate of one new subscriber every three seconds then those royalty payments will likely rise again, but the Apple competition is a big distraction. Apple Music will launch on June 30th priced at $9.99 a month, and it will reignite the streaming music battle once again. Spotify has prepared itself for battle with a $526 million war chest.

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