Apple says the App Store has now paid out over $25 billion to European developers

In a statement to Macerkopf, Apple’s vice president of Apple Music and International Content announces that App Store payments to European developers have just exceeded $25 billion.

Schusser became the head of Apple Music last year with the departure of Jimmy Iovine. In his role as head of international content, he is also expected to be working on programming for Apple’s upcoming TV and news/magazine subscription services.

As of January, Apple said total developer payouts topped $120 billion. This means about 20% of total App Store sales flow to European app developers.

Schusser repeats the same 50 million paying subscriber figure for Apple Music that we heard at the last earnings call. Interestingly, he underlines Apple’s exclusive music deals as part of the statement, which is intriguing as Apple Music had seemed to be turning its back on ‘early access’ partnerships following some backlash from labels.

Schusser announced the latest figures for Apple Podcasts with a library of 650,000 podcasts and over 50 billion episodes streamed or downloaded to date.

The full statement (translated from German) below:

Our services, which include content stores, Apple Pay and iCloud Storage, are targeting $ 40 billion in annual sales. In January, we announced that developer revenue in the App Store reached $ 120 billion. Payments to European developers have just exceeded $ 25 billion. Since its launch nearly 4 years ago, Apple Music now has 50 million paying users around the world. We are the leading music streaming service in the US and the world’s leading music service on the iPhone. Our customers love the great content, be it via playlists, radio, beats 1 or suggestions in For You. Apple Music was the first place to hear the great new music of Nicki Minaj, The Weeknd and Frank Ocean, just to name a few. Beats 1 also features exclusive and popular artist-led shows, including Drake, Nicki Minaj, Ezra Koenig, Lars Ulrich and Elton John. The last update I want to release today is Podcasting, where our customers downloaded and streamed over 50 billion episodes of 650,000 active shows on Apple podcasts.