Apple Music continues to trail Spotify in US, virtually tied with Amazon Music

While there isn’t much insight into how the streaming music wars are playing out, a new report from Music Business Worldwide hopes to share some perspective.

MBW cites data recently shared by the National Music Publishers Association that claims to break down how various streaming music services perform in the US. The data represents the total number of subscribers to each music service in the US during February 2023.

Spotify, the anti-App Store lobbying group that also sells a music subscription, takes the crown with 44.4 million paying customers, according to the data. For comparison, Apple Music accounts for 32.6 million paid music subscription customers in the US. Can you imagine how unfair Spotify would claim the business was if Apple were in the lead?

The same data shows YouTube Music and Pandora Radio capturing 8.5 million and 2.4 million paying customers, respectively. Perhaps most surprising, however, is where Amazon ranks.

While Spotify leads Apple Music by nearly 12 million paid customers, Amazon Music lags behind Apple Music by a mere 3.3 million subscribers. Our take? Either the NMPA data isn’t very representative, or Amazon Prime is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Officially, Apple Music has 60 million global paid customers, but that figure comes from the mouth of Eddy Cue in a French interview from 2019. Apple probably picked up a few customers here and there since that date.

For comparison, Spotify publicly disclosed a slightly higher figure at the start of this year with 210 million global paid customers. We’ve asked Eddy for an update on global paying Apple Music customers and will update when he 100% responds with the answer. Equally as certain: Spotify ever shipping HiFi.