NEW ORLEANS, LA - JUNE 30: ESSENCE Live Host, Dana Blair attends the Apple R&B Rising Event during... [+] the 2016 ESSENCE Festival presented By Coca-Cola at Kingsway Mansion on June 30, 2016, in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Photo by Bennett Raglin/Getty Images for 2016 Essence Festival) During its annual big event yesterday, Apple revealed that its streaming music platform has now been able to accrue 17 million paying customers, even though it is only just over one year old. That’s a very impressive number, and it makes Apple Music one of the largest services in terms of paying subscriber numbers in the world. The jump in users is not just good news for Apple, it’s good news for the entire music industry. Thanks to some smaller players making big moves and the larger services collecting millions of new users all the time, the streaming music industry can now claim 100 million paying customers around the world, which is a very big deal for the ever-expanding business. Just a short time ago, new Spotify hire Troy Carter revealed that his employer now has 39 million paying customers listening to music, which is up significantly from when the company’s CEO tweeted that the Swedish giant had reached 30 million not too long ago. That number is just about the same number of subscribers satellite radio pioneer Sirius XM has collected over the years it has been in business. Add in the tallies of companies like Tidal, Napster, Deezer and a handful of others, and the millions truly begin to add up. In fact, there are probably more than 100 million paying subscribers in the world, but companies like YouTube and SoundCloud won’t reveal the subscription numbers connected to their newly-launched streaming music platforms just yet. While 100 million is certainly a wonderful marker to pass, there are actually many more people out there streaming away, though not all of them are paying for it. Spotify alone has 100 million users, though only about 30-40% of them are paying for the privilege of ad-free listening. Converting those users already comfortable with the idea of streaming music, while also attracting new users by the boatload, is vital to ensuring that this new form of media consumption is able to survive the coming years. 100 million paying customers means that while there is still a lot that needs to be worked out when it comes to payments, technology, reporting, and so on, streaming music is picking up steam, and the masses have definitely chosen this method as their go-to for accessing music. Streaming music will be better for everyone involved—especially those looking to make a living off the music they create—as the industry grows, and the more people pressing play on songs and paying their monthly dues, the better. This is just one major milestone, and there are sure to be many more in the not-too-distant future, as the rate of people signing up and handing over their credit card information is rising almost as quickly as the numbers themselves.
Over 100 million people globally are currently paying to stream music. Spotify hosts the most of these subscriptions, with 39 million paying customers, while Apple recently announced that over 17 million people were paying for its streaming services. Critics, however, have warned that these services must still invest in efforts to convert users to paid subscriptions, as Spotify alone still has around 61 million users on its free service.