Spotify and Apple Music are two of the biggest music streaming services in the world. Spotify remains on top but it appears that Apple Music has been able to make a dent in one of the most lucrative markets for music streaming. According to a new report, Apple Music’s subscriber count in the United States has now overtaken Spotify.
Reuters hears from a person familiar with the matter that Apple’s music streaming service overtook Spotify in terms of paid subscribers in the United States. The source added that while Spotify had 26 million paid subscribers at the end of February 2019, Apple Music came in with 28 million subscribers.
Spotify continues to have more listeners in the United States overall because of its free, ad-supported tier. As far as the international subscriber count is concerned, analysts believe that Spotify still leads the market in terms of paying subscribers across the globe.
The figures are difficult to confirm since neither Apple nor Spotify reveals country-level listener data. Apple doesn’t really disclose the number of total subscribers regularly, the last time it did that was in May 2018 when it hit 50 million subscribers. Spotify revealed in its recent quarterly report that it has 96 million paid subscribers across the globe and 207 million monthly active users.