Apple Music has more than 6.5 million paying customers three weeks after its earliest adopters reached the end of their free trial of the music streaming service, according to chief executive Tim Cook.
Talking at the WSJD Live conference in California, Cook indicated that another 8.5 million people are still in the service’s three-month trial period, giving it 15 million users overall.
“I think it’s fabulous, and to have over 15 million on there, and 6.5 million in the paid category, I’m really happy about it. And I think the runway here is really good,” said Cook, according to CNET.
Apple Music launched on 30 June, and took its first monthly subscription payments from people who signed up at launch on 30 September.
The company’s services boss Eddy Cue announced in early August that Apple Music had signed up 11 million trial members in its first month, but Cook’s comments are the first time the company has revealed any figures on the service’s conversion rate.
Did all those 6.5 million subscribers intend to pay for Apple Music, though? Everyone signing up for the free trial agreed to an automatic subscription payment kicking in three months later, unless they cancelled it in the meantime.
Music industry analyst Mark Mulligan of Midia Research predicted in August that as many as half of first-month Apple Music payers would have forgotten to cancel, but would quickly rectify that.
Still, according to Cook’s figure, Apple Music is now the second most popular music subscription service behind Spotify, which has 20 million subscribers – although that figure includes people who signed up to a three-month $1 trial of that service, some of whom may have cancelled once that period elapsed.
Rival Deezer claims just over 6.3 million, but when the company recently filed to go public, it revealed that only three million were actually using the service, with the rest classed as “monthly inactive bundle subscribers” getting it for free with a mobile contract, but not using it.
US streaming radio service Pandora has 3.9 million people paying for its Pandora One premium tier, while Rhapsody – which operates as Napster outside North America – has three million subscribers. Rivals like Google Play Music and Rdio have not announced their subscriber figures.
