
The big question mark over Apple Music has been how many customers would choose to try it out, and – crucially – how many of them would be willing to pay for the service once the free trial ended. Tim Cook answered both questions yesterday, revealing that the service currently has 15M subscribers, of whom 6.5M are paying customers.
There are still plenty of unknowns, of course. We don’t know the exact split between individual and family subscriptions (though family subs were around 18% back in August), and we don’t know how subscribers map out across the countries – both of which we’d need to know to accurately calculate how much Apple is earning from the service.
But if we do a back-of-an-envelope guesstimate and say that the split between solo and family accounts is around 80/20 and that the costlier countries like those in Europe cancel out the cheaper ones like India, then an average monthly subscription of $11 times 6.5M customers gives us $72M a month. Multiply that by 12 months, and we can get $858M Apple Music revenue per year. Given that this is all very rough and ready, let’s call it a billion dollars a year in round numbers … expand full story