Apple Music gets 6.5 million paying customers

After an initial battle with Taylor Swift, Apple's Music service is off to a good start, gaining one-third the number of Spotify's subscriber base in just four months. Photo / AP

Apple Music is just a little over four months old, but it seems to be off to a decent start.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook announced this week that the company's music service has 6.5 million paying customers, and 15 million users overall.

The company had previously announced that 11 million people had signed up for Apple Music, which any Apple customer can do straight from their iPhone, iPad, Mac or iPod. But that figure captured who had signed onto Apple's service during a free trial period - the real question was who was going to pay up to keep the service.

Having 6.5 million paid users does mean that there were millions of trial users that Apple didn't convince to dole out $10 per month ($14 for families up to six) for the service. Yet while the numbers pale in comparison to its top competitors - Spotify claims a total community, paid and non-paid, of 75 million - it's still a pretty sizable group of consumers for a new service.

That's especially true for paid customers: Spotify, which was founded in 2010, said in June that it has 20 million paid customers - and that it took it five and a half years to hit 10 million.

Apple gained one-third of Spotify's paid subscribers in just four months, likely thanks to the fact that it had a built-in distribution system in the form of its devices. It's very easy to sign up for Apple Music. The company also had the natural advantage of being able to piggyback off of iTunes - far and away the leading music downloading program in the United States, according MusicWatch Inc., an entertainment market research firm.

This doesn't mean, however, that Apple's service is an unqualified success. It remains to be seen how many of the people still on a trial will also pay to keep Apple Music going. Many may not even realise that their free trial has now turned into an auto-renewing subscription. To get a real read on the health of Apple Music, we have to check again when all of those bills come due.