June 28, 2022

As Apple only discloses its paid-user total for all services – including Apple Music, Apple Fitness+, Apple TV+, and more – the precise number of Apple Music subscribers has long been a subject of speculation. Now, J.P. Morgan has predicted that the platform will have 110 million subscriptions by 2025.

Apple indicated in late April that it boasted 825 million paid users across its service offerings, which higher-ups said had generated a record high of $19.82 billion during the three months ending on March 26th. The former total marked a hike of “more than 165 million during the last 12 months alone,” CFO Luca Maestri emphasized, spurring renewed discussion about the exact extent of Apple Music’s base.

(More recently, reports have suggested that many are cancelling their music subscriptions due to financial concerns – including over one million cancellations in the United Kingdom during Q1 2022.)

Keeping in mind the overall subscribership jump for Apple services, several observers promptly weighed in on the long-raised possibility of Apple Music’s having overtaken Spotify in the paid-user department. In its own latest earnings report, covering January, February, and March, the Stockholm-based platform reported having 182 million premium subscribers.

The figure represented a quarter-over-quarter improvement of just two million, but Spotify likewise lost about 1.5 million subscriptions by ceasing operations in Russia during the three-month stretch, execs communicated. In any event, amid strong international-subscriber growth for Spotify, past reports have claimed that Apple Music had topped the competitor in terms of U.S. subscriptions.

And as mentioned at the outset, J.P. Morgan has added a highly interesting piece to the puzzle by projecting that Apple Music will crack 110 million subscriptions by 2025.

This prediction came specifically from Samik Chatterjee as part of an optimistic overview of Apple’s operations, which the J.P. Morgan analyst believes could contribute to a stock price of over $200 per share (against about $136 currently).

After emphasizing the coming increase in and evolution of “global advertisement spends” and the associated advantages for the App Store owner Apple – Spotify is also looking to capitalize upon the trends, it bears noting – Chatterjee expressed the belief that the Cupertino-headquartered company’s gaming and music offerings will generate $8.2 billion ($7 billion for Apple Music) annually by 2025.

$8.2 billion would represent a 36 percent boost from the segments’ present income, and J.P. Morgan believes that the double-digit hike will be made possible by Apple’s achieving a combined 180-million-account subscriber base for gaming and music. Said subscriber base would consist of the initially highlighted 110 million subscribers for Apple Music, with the remaining 70 million deriving from the gaming side.

It’s unclear how many subscribers J.P. Morgan attributes to Apple Music at the moment, but needless to say, the figure isn’t as large as Spotify’s total premium users – assuming that the 2025 prediction is accurate and based upon actual subscribership data.

However, both services are expanding their offerings in an effort to attract fans and improve revenue, and it’ll be worth seeing how these initiatives, in coordination with competition from fast-rising regional players, affect growth in the long term.

Increasing volumes mean increased costs

Cost is a priority. For CMOs, increased streaming data would have meant increasing resources and overheads such as costly servers, putting a strain on budgets. However The Matching Engine also adapts costs to manage volume changes, CMOs pay for what they use each month. Also taking advantage of the elasticity of the cloud, CMOs can reduce overheads by reassigning team resources to other roles. Through automation, reporting and cloud technologies, there is no longer a need for constant human monitoring.