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Leaked figures show Beats Music struggling

Leaked figures show Beats Music struggling
Jonathan Riggall

Jonathan Riggall

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Beats Music, the Spotify competitor launched earlier this year, had only 111,000 users by March this year. The details came from a leaked royalty report, and show how far the service has to go to catch its rivals.

However, this number might even be artificially high, as AT&T has been offering its users a free 90 day trial of the ‘family’ version of the service. Of the 111,000 registered accounts, just over 60,000 are family accounts, and no one knows how many of those were paid or part of the free promotion. Spotify, in contrast, has one million paid subscribers in the US alone, and 24 million active users worldwide, six million of which are subscribers in total.

The leaked report also shows that Beats Music pays less royalties than Spotify, at $0.000126 per play. Spotify pays between $0.006 and $0.0084 per play.

The leak of these details follows a weekend of intense speculation, which suggests Apple has bought the company for $3.2 billion. Some people have suggested the purchase is about Apple being behind with streaming music, but it would seem unlikely given its relatively small user base, and US only service. More likely is Apple wants to use Beats’ brand power for some reason, possibly just headphones, ot perhaps to give its rumored wearable device a boost.

The Beats Music app was updated at the start of May, and now lets you subscribe and manage your account from the app itself. An iPad version has also been introduced, with a new interface especially for tablet sized screens.

Whatever the future holds for Beats Music, Spotify, with its global reach and huge user base has little to fear if these numbers are genuine.

Source: The Guardian

Follow Jonathan on Twitter @jonathanriggall

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