Apple Music is approaching its eighth birthday as the music streamer was unveiled on June 30th, 2015. The recurring subscription service was created after Apple made its largest acquisition of all time, the $3 billion purchase of Beats Audio nine years ago. Beats Music, which eventually was revamped by Apple to become Apple Music, had only 111,000 subscribers when Beats Audio was sold.
A tweet from pop culture-based social media presence Pop Base (via BGR) notes that not one tune in Apple Music’s inventory of music has been streamed one billion times. The closest song to reaching that figure, with more than 930 million streams, is “Shape Of You” by Ed Sheeran. Last week Apple noted, “Sheeran is one of the top performing artists of all time on Apple Music, with more than 9.5 billion plays globally and 240 million Shazam tags.”
Apple Music’s rival Spotify has had several songs streamed one billion times and you can’t use Spotify’s earlier 2008 launch as the reason for this. As an example, Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” has been out for only four months and already has more than one billion streams on Spotify. One reason for this discrepancy between the two streamers could be the number of premium subscribers each has.
Spotify itself announced that as of the end of the fourth quarter, it had 205 million paying premium subscribers and 295 million listening via its ad-supported tier. Since Apple doesn’t release these numbers anymore, we have to use the figures for Q4 posted by MIDiA which show nearly 85 million subscribers to Apple Music. While Apple does offer a free one-month trial to its music streamer, it does not have an ad-supported service as Spotify does.
While the difference in the number of subscribers explains why Spotify can catapult a four-month-old tune to hit one billion streams and Apple Music has never had a song hit that benchmark, it doesn’t explain the difference in each platform’s most popular song. That, dear readers, is a matter of taste. While “Shape Of You” is the most streamed song in Apple Music history to date, Spotify’s most listened-to tune is “Blinding Lights” by the Weeknd.
