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Was Apple Music's Initial Goal Of 100 Million Subscribers Too Ambitious?

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This article is more than 7 years old.

At the end of next month, Apple Music will celebrate its first birthday, and it’s been quite the year for the streaming music platform. Just a short time ago, the company announced it had accrued 13 million subscribers. That’s a good start (just ask competitors like Tidal, which have been around just as long but which only have a fraction of the base that Apple has collected), but it’s not even close to the initial goals the company set when it finally ventured into streaming music last June.

When the Cupertino-based company first launched its streaming platform, it burst out of the gate with incredibly lofty goals. According to one report, those working on Apple Music established that it was going to reach 100 million subscribers, no matter what. Apple is facing a number of challenges in reaching that nine-figure mark, and it is worth considering if that number was perhaps too ambitious, and entirely unrealistic, for the near future.

Since it went public, Apple Music hasn’t received the kind of praise that the conglomerate has gotten used to over the years. The design of the platform doesn't have the same beauty and functionality that many of the company's physical devices do, and that has been a serious problem. In fact, just a few days ago, it was revealed that Apple is working on overhauling the site, even before the product passes the twelve-month-old threshold. To redesign so early on shows that things really weren't working out, and that could have turned off potential customers.

Another issue in reaching 100 million subscribers is the size of the market. Music lovers are everywhere, but that doesn’t mean they are all willing to pay for a streaming service. In fact, the entire industry still has a lot of convincing to do, as there is a huge percentage of the population that isn't yet interested in monthly fees just to listen to tunes. The fact of the matter is that the market hasn’t grown enough to support such an enormous customer base for just one company yet. There are still millions upon millions of people who haven’t yet even tried a streaming platform, and even the biggest companies in the space haven’t attracted 100 million people around the world to sign up and hand over their credit card info.

The problem isn’t necessarily that Apple hasn’t been able to convince people to leave Spotify or dump Pandora in favor of its product, but rather that there just aren’t 100 million people to be won over...yet. The streaming music industry grows in size every year, and that trend is not going to stop anytime soon. Spotify is getting close to hitting Apple’s goal, but that’s only because the Swedish streamer has a free tier, and the majority of its users opt not to pay. Just a few months ago, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek revealed in a tweet that the service now has 30 million paying customers. That’s certainly a win for it, but it is still a long ways away from 100 million.

It is worth noting that when Apple came up with that 100 million number, even the biggest in the field had only managed to acquire about one quarter that number, and those companies were years ahead of the tech giant. Apple may eventually reach its potentially record-breaking goals, but the possibility of such an accomplishment is still many years off.