Streaming music service Spotify has announced that it has hit the milestone of 100 million active users. The service credited rival music streamer Apple Music for helping to popularize subscription music services and lifting the overall numbers for the industry.
Spotify has been teetering on the edge of 100 million active uers for a while now, and observers have been waiting for it to officially hit the mark and make the announcement. At the end of 2015, the streamer was reported to have 89 million active users, but the last official announcement by the company pegged the number of listeners at 75 million.
Spotify is an on demand streaming service, which means that listeners can choose to hear specific songs, albums, or playlists consisting of multiple songs.
Other radio based streaming services like Pandora, operate differently. With Pandora, iHeartRadio and the like, the user has no control over what songs are actually played, they can only choose a station based on genre or a particular artist, in which case the specific songs by the artist cannot be selected and are limited to only several each hour.
While iHeart Radio is growing quickly and Pandora is still the largest overall music streamer in the U.S., Spotify is certainly on a roll. The pace at which it has added new subscribers has sped up considerably since Apple Music, which is now considered Spotify's main rival in the on demand field, entered the market last year. Apple Music has been very successful as of late, recently reporting that it has now amassed a total of 15 million subscribers and is now growing at a rate of 1 million subscribers per month.
Apple Music, however, remains available to subscribers only, while Spotify operates two separate tiers, one being its paid tier, which, like Apple, requires a payment of $9.99 per month, while Spotify's free tier is ad supported and accounts for the majority of their user base.
Spotify recently announced that it has 30 million subscribers on its paid tier, and based upon the prior subscriber base statistics, it is now growing its number of paid users at the same 1 million per month rate as Apple.
Spotify recently gave credit to its rival Apple for bringing more consumer awareness to the paid subscription streaming model and claimed that Apple Music's appearance has helped Spotify to grow. Spotify is taking a page out of its rivals book, however, as it recently hired Lady Gaga's former manager Troy Carter to beef up its exclusive offerings. Apple's exclusives such as Drake and Chance The Rapper's latest albums have buoyed its success, and Spotify now hopes to stay on top by taking a bite out of Apple's playbook.
