Apple Music customers don’t stream as much as Spotify users … yet

It’s impossible to get a clear picture of the answer, however, because Apple Music now has no paying subscribers. Unlike other musicians, Young’s primary beef with Spotify and similar services wasn’t about the economics of streaming. The two-time Grammy victor has made good on a promise to start pulling his entire catalogue from streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music, citing sound quality issues as the reason.

All of these albums were recorded by the musician for Geffen Records. So using that ratio, we might expect that Apple Music users listeners were generating around 13 percent of the total streams that Spotify users were generating. Spotify has over 75 million active users across the globe, while it’s estimated that Apple Music has 10 million so far. While it therefore appears as if Apple Music is not performing so well, at least for Patterson’s label, he hypothesizes that the disparity may be resulting from the type of music released on DashGo, which represents relatively obscure, indie artists.

Secondly, DashGo’s CEO Ben Patterson believes it could be because of the way Apple Music is targeted.

“AM radio kicked streaming’s ass”. In the coming months, we should get a better idea of how the streaming service is doing, especially when subscribers’ trial periods begin running out beginning in October.

Patterson also thinks that Spotify’s emphasis on user-created playlists, which can be shared throughout the service and updated over time, also helps users with very specific tastes find new stuff.

Then again, you might think that the people eager to try out a new subscription music service would be aficionados who would be the most interested in listening hard-to-find stuff.