Last week, Apple announced Apple Music Live would return for a second season with a special performance by Ed Sheeran. But despite promoting his new album, the Cupertino firm let slip important information (via Pop Base) about its music streaming service, which launched in 2015.
After eight years, no artist could hit one billion streams on a single song, which shows the giant contrast between Apple Music and Spotify, as Apple’s competitor is constantly adding new records with the most played songs and how fast some artists can surpass one billion streams.
Apple’s press release stated: “Sheeran is one of the top performing artists of all time on Apple Music, with more than 9.5 billion plays globally and 240 million Shazam tags. His smash 2017 single ‘Shape of You’ is the most streamed song of all time on Apple Music, with more than 930 million plays worldwide.”
That said, the closest song on Apple Music to one billion streams is Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You, but it’s still around 70 million streams away from the mark.
To understand the difference between Spotify and Apple Music userbase, yesterday, Spotify announced that the streaming is offering a Blend playlist with Miley Cyrus so that you can combine your music taste with the American singer.
The company is offering this blended playlist because Miley Cyrus broke a record by making Flowers the fastest song to reach 1 billion streams in the platform’s history. To compare, Flowers was released four months ago and already had more than 1 billion streams. On the other hand, Apple Music has a 2017 song that still hasn’t achieved this mark as its most popular song. Brutal.
According to a MIdIA report, Spotify had almost 190M subscribers during the first half of 2022, while Apple Music had nearly 85 million users. While we don’t have new data to compare, both platforms likely have a similar number now. This shows Spotify has a vast user base, which makes it understandable why songs can reach a billion streams faster there.
While Apple Music userbase is something Apple should be proud of, I bet the company needs to push more popular songs to keep up this streaming battle.
