In June of this year Apple entered the music streaming game with its Apple Music service. Despite massive players like Pandora, Google Play Music and Spotify, Apple’s made another success out of it: the service already has 15 million users, 6.5 million of which are paying customers while 8.5 million are on three-month trials.
Apple CEO Tim Cook announced these numbers in a conference on Monday. While the three month trial is free, users will have to pay for the service after the fact. An individual membership is R60 per month while the family membership (for up to six people) is R90.
Doing some quick maths: if all of those 6.5 million paying subscribers are shelling out R60, then R390 million is being generated by the service every month. While this number is probably off (due to currency conversions, users choosing the family membership and other factors we may not know about), that’s still a large amount of money being generated every 30 or so days.
The conversion rate from free trial members to paying members seems to be high at the moment. Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue said that 11 million people were involved in the trial membership in August.
With Apple Music only being a few days old at this point, its initial success looks like Apple has once again applied its Midas Touch to a new avenue of business. Now we’re even more interested to see if they can pull of the same in the automotive industry.
Unfortunately, Tim Cook declined to comment on Apple’s rumoured electric car at the conference. Hopefully he’ll have something to say about it really soon.
[Source – Wall Street Journal, Image – CC By 2.0/Pictures of Money]
