TapTechNews August 5th news, according to Bloomberg, Universal Music Group revealed in an interview today that the growth rate of users of streaming services such as Apple's AppleMusic is slow. Referring to the data disclosed by Apple, since the number of AppleMusic users reached 60 million in 2019, the company has not updated the data information. This implies that today, 5 years later (in 2024), the number of Apple's AppleMusic users may not have reached 70 million yet..
In addition to Apple's AppleMusic, the user growth curves of streaming platforms such as Spotify and Amazon have also flattened. Boyd Muir, the chief financial officer of Universal Music Group, believes this is a common industry phenomenon:
Nowadays, streaming media has left the era of high growth, and the user growth rates of major platforms have gradually slowed down. Many companies in the industry have carried out layoffs to deal with the crisis, but it is indeed difficult for a single company to change the sluggish situation of the platform user growth curve by itself.
However, Apple still has full confidence in its own AppleMusic streaming service. Referring to the TapTechNews report on March 7th this year, Oliver Schusser, the vice president in charge of AppleMusic, AppleTV+, Beats and other sections of Apple, when facing the interview with the magazine Wallpaper, believes that Apple is constantly introducing new features for AppleMusic when most people in the industry stop innovating:
We focus on music, while others are shifting from music to podcasts and audio books... When most others in the market have stopped innovating, we have been constantly striving.
At the same time, Oliver Schusser also emphasized a series of new features launched by AppleMusic in recent years, such as the K-song mode, the dedicated Classical application, spatial audio and dynamic lyrics, etc., and said that these are all enough to prove the excellence and innovation of AppleMusic.